Carl Henrikson Narrator

Professor Allen Nevins and Mr. Louis M. Starr Interviewers

December 27, 1954 642 Fifth Avenue, New York City

It was interesting to see how much it cost to feed a man per day up in the woods. I kept records and showed them to the cooks in the various camps. It became competitive with them to see who could feed the men at the lowest cost and yet satisfy them, because it would hurt a cook’s reputation terrible to have any complaint about his food. As I recall it, in the summertime it would cost a good deal more because they had to serve eggs and bacon and ham; they couldn’t serve fresh meat because they didn’t have any way to keep it. In the summertimeProject--this was back in 1923--we fed men at a cost of about ninety-one, ninety-two or ninety- three cents a day. In the wintertime we could feed them for about seventy-seven or seventy-eight cents a day. They ate more beans and fresh meat in wintertime. Fresh meat actually cost less than hams and bacon and eggs. We also had some fresh vegetables, but not a great many. We didSociety use colored oleomargarine in those days, believe it or not. History There was no company dietician; the cook was the dietician. But the men oftentimes got fresh meat for breakfast, at noon and at night. Of course, on the log drives, they got four meals a day. They started work at six o’clock in the morningOral and they got breakfast. There was another meal fed them on the banks about the middle of the morning, ten-thirty, another one around three and another one around seven-thirty. Of course a good many of the men were not near the Wannigan that’s the floating cook camp. They were what Historicalwe called the “beat crews”. They walked up and down the rivers to see that the logs kept flowing freely, and they carried “nose bags” with them. As a matter of fact, most of the men who were working on the wings and down the river apiece also carried nose bags. It Historywas a white canvas bag twelve inches long and about eight inches wide, with a strap that could be put around the neck. The men would go around the loaded tables filling their nose bags. They had to be very careful where they left them because a lot of squirrels and chipmunks up there certainly went after those nose bags. I remember one time when we were all wearing our nose bags--at that time we put the strap around so that the nose bag was right back of our necks and wasn’t in the way--I was with a fellow who always tried to tip me into the water when I gotForest on a log withMinnesota him, and so I thought it would be fun to tip him in, and I did. Of course his nose bag got soaking wet. I pulled him up on the log and said, “Look, I’ve got plenty in my nose bag. I can share with you.”

He said, “That’s all right. I’ve got fourteen hardboiled eggs in here; it hasn’t hurt a thing.” They were great egg eaters. We happened to pass by a big chicken farm once. I was amazed to see this chicken farm on the banks of this river. We were short of eggs, and I went up and talked to the farmer and told him I would buy all his eggs. He said, “Oh, young man, you don’t know how

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many eggs I’ve got.”

“You don’t know how many eggs I need!”

There were six hundred dozen eggs. I bought them all, and we took them down to the river in buckets and bushel baskets. They didn’t last very long. We had seventy-seven men on this particular crew and I think they lasted about a week or so. The cook made everything out of eggs, and they ate eggs to beat the band. Eggs are very good for the health, and take the place of meat, supplying protein.

Before I got into this, I was working at the YMCA up in Duluth, Minnesota. I had plans to go to college. I wanted to get into some kind of work that would enable me to get a stake and finance my way through. I had a ticket to sail on the Great Lakes as a mate, and I had arranged to go on a ship at seven o’clock the next morning as a mate. That evening a young fellow, a tall good looking chap by the name of Jack Campbell, got in touch with me to say he wanted me to go into the woods with him as a clerk. He had just organized a new company, Projecta partnership with Mortimer Shiels--Mort Shiels was an old-timer in the woods. Jack had graduated from Yale; I think a year or two before and had a fling at speculative oil drilling. Jack’s father was woods superintendent for the Cloquet and Northern lumber companies, the Weyerhaeuser operation. Jack had gotten a contract with Mort Shiels to build twelve and one halfSociety miles of railroad from Outpost 25 on the Duluth Northeastern to the Cloquet River. The lumber company had sold the river rights to the power comp any and they had to hoistHistory the logs out of the dam flowage, haul the logs over to the Duluth Northeastern Railroad and then back to Cloquet. That’s how I happened to get into the woods. I liked Jack Campbell and he offered me what at that time was a pretty good salary--one hundred and twenty-Oralfive dollars a month and food. I could save all the money, which was extremely important. This was in 1923.

I started as clerk. As a matter of fact, I was accountaHistoricalnt for the company. Jack and Mort each gave me twenty-five dollars when I went up to this railroad car which was the camp, and that was the paid-in capital of Campbell & Shiels. They had expected that it would take us about six months to build this railroad. WhenHistory I went up there, there was just Chris Lee, the foreman, and two or three other fellows in the camp cars. Chris had laid out the railroad, not with surveying instruments, but just over pointed sticks, and he did a remarkable job.

The road was built in three months instead of six. The total contract had been seventy-five thousand dollars. When we closed the books we had a cash profit of forty thousand, and we had horses andForest a lot of equipment,Minnesota so we did extremely well.

One of the reasons we did well was this: they had expected that we would have to haul in gravel from a gravel pit up the line on the Duluth Northeastern and that we would have to use gravel trains. A gravel train was a train of flat cars with sides that swung open. Then they would have what looked like a snow plow. They would start at one end of the cars and they would have a winch. They would pull that plow through the gravel trains, the gravel would go out on the side of the road, and they would shovel the gravel back on the tracks.

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We tried something new. Chris and I talked this over many evenings. We had seen ore cars which could dump cinders right on the tracks themselves. So we decided that we could rent some ore cars, get the gravel right on our own line within a quarter of a mile from where we had the camp less, even and we wouldn’t have to rent the gravel train, which the comp any was going to rent us, of course.

I think we rented five or seven ore cars, and we filled them with gravel. We put the gravel on the tracks by merely putting a tie against the rear truck, opening up the hopper and pulling the car along. We had the gravel right where we wanted it, and it didn’t have to be shoveled on the tracks. All we had to do was jack up the track and let it fall on top of the gravel. Then, with the big gandy dancers, the men who tamped the gravel, tamping a little bit under each side, we had the road in good shape.

We had no trestles to build; it was all filled. So the job was done faster than they expected and we came out with a very good profit. Project Then the logging company decided that they would try to get some of that excessive profit back from us. They had some scattered timber near Caribou Lake. It was about two and one half miles from a little station called Bartlett, very close to Duluth, incidentally. Because it was a stand that had to be got out in one year, and we had to build five camps, they didn’tSociety think that we could make any money on the contract they gave us, which was about five dollars less than other people had bid. But we made money on the job too. WeHistory had the same gang. As a matter of fact, we had most of the crew from the railroad job to work in the camps, but we had to recruit lumberjacks from Duluth. We had to pay a recruiting fee of, I think, a dollar or a dollar and a half per man, and then we had to pay two dollarsOral and a half per man to haul them up in the woods by taxis. They had great big Studebaker cars that they hauled the men up in.

Although that operation only lasted a year, we Historicalhad to build about five miles of railroad and forty miles of sleigh haul road. It was expensive building the camps for one year’s operation, but we still came out quite well. As I recall it-- and this is only a guess--we got that timber out at a cost of about twelve dollars andHistory a half per thousand. We took the pine, both white and red pine, or Norway, and the spruce and the straight birch--nothing else. We did take out some pulpwood, but not a great deal. We took some pulpwood on the Cloquet River, where we could bank it for the drive.

The timber was owned by the Cloquet and Northern Lumber Company, an independent outfit. CampbellForest & Shiels contractedMinnesota to take it out for the Weyerhaeuser companies. We put some in the lower Cloquet, but for the most part, it was railroaded out.

I can’t recall exactly how many men we had. We had about one hundred men at Camp One, the main camp, where I was, and probably one hundred fifty or two hundred men in all, at the other camps. I do remember that we had about two hundred and fifty head of horses. Those horses we rented from road contractors, who in the summertime used them to build roads. In those days, they didn’t have the big mechanized road equipment. We didn’t have mechanized equipment in the camp, either--no trucks, no caterpillars or “cats”, as they called them; we didn’t have a drop

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of gasoline in the camp. The only petroleum product we had was kerosene to clean off the saws. As a matter of fact, this life was good for the horses. The horses would be shipped to us. That particular year contracting had not been too good, and the horses had been out on the range up in the Dakotas all summer long. I remember the barn boss coming in and saying, “My God, look at them. Three inches of hair on them. We won’t be able to feed them oats for a month!” You have to be very careful, of course, in feeding oats to horses that haven’t been working. But after a month or so, their hair was short, and they had nice shiny coats and were in good shape. We had to account for every horse as they were unloaded. They had harnesses on them, and I learned something about harnesses, about breechings and martingales. I had to check every horse as it came off the car, as to what harness it had on, because we had to send him back the same way. I wasn’t a farm boy, but I had worked on farms and I knew harnesses. I had harnessed horses a good deal.

We got our supply of labor from Duluth, from the employment offices. They were lumberjacks, Finns and Swedes, for the most part. There were some people with good American names like Ryan and Sullivan, but we had a great many Finns. You see, the story wasProject that the logging companies had imported them from Finland, had settled them on homesteads up there, and then bought the homesteads and the timber back from them a little later on. I don’t know what the arrangement was, but that was the story. There are a good many beautiful Finnish log cabins up in that area built with square, modest hewn logs. When they got a littleSociety more money, they put siding on them, because then they had gone a little bit further, you see, and they could hide the fact that they lived in log cabins. History

We had a good many men who came up as “gypos”. A gypo was a contractor, and he contracted out a number of different kinds of woods operationsOral --for instance, building right of way, both sleigh-haul and railroad right of way. He contracted that out at so much per station. A station is one hundred feet. The negotiations were extremely interesting, because they usually consisted of the foreman taking the men out and they had toHistorical build through. Then the gypo, the head of the station gang, would get with his men and would make a proposal to the foreman, so many dollars per hundred feet. In easy territory, where they had to just cut the trees down and leave a few logs, they would do a hundred Historyfeet ready for laying the track at around five dollars a hundred feet. Through tough country, where they really had to do a lot of rough work, it ran sometimes as high as seventeen dollars per hundred feet. And the men paid one dollar a day out of that for their room and board. We supplied them the dynamite, of course, for blowing the rocks, supplied them the tools, and kept the saws sharp from our own filing shack.

But it usedForest to be interestingMinnesota to get in on those negotiations, because they would come up with an offer of, say, seven dollars and a half a hundred, and the foreman would say,

“Oh, gosh, sorry, somebody else wants to do this for six.” They would get into a huddle again and would come back, “Well, we’ll do it for six seventy-five.” Usually, then, that would be the deal, six seventy-five or whatever it was.

Then we also contracted out sawing of the logs. As I recall it, the highest price we ever paid for sawing huge white and Norway pine, was six cents a log, and that meant cutting the tree down,

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cutting it into lengths and swamping out a path so that the teamsters could get in and skid the logs out. We did most of the swamping--swamping means cutting the branches off the trees. Sometimes we had the swampers cut out a trail so that the teams could get in and skid out. We also contracted out tie cutting. In those days, we were paying eighteen cents a tie. For that, they had to cut down the tree, hew the two sides and cut it into eight foot lengths, a tie was eight feet long. Of course, we paid a little bit more when they made up a set of switch ties. A set of switch ties would be thirty-two ties of varying lengths. They had to be better ties, too, made of a little heavier stuff. The Finnish men were, for the most part, the tie cutters. They were pretty good with a thirteen pound broadax--that’s what it took to hew.

In the summertime that was a mean job, because those big mosquitoes up there were miserable. When you’re up on this tree, which is usually left hanging with the branches at a slant of about thirty-five degrees, those mosquitoes get you on the back of the neck. The f inns used to say, “We never know whether to drop the ax when they’re straight over our head, slap the mosquito, or not.” Project But these Finlanders had a pretty tough row to hoe, and of course, they did everything in the world they could to cheat the lumber company. One of their neat little tricks was to take the butt end of the last piece they had cut off, a piece probably a foot long, and put that in the pile. When I would come along and mark them off, and check it in my book to paySociety them, I would pay them for a little piece about a foot long. I caught on to that pretty soon, and would never count a pile unless they unpiled the thing first and let me see that Historythere were no butts sticking in there. That was a trick they liked to pull because the wood looks the same all over.

They would have me come in and count theirOral piles of ties, which I would do and mark up. Then if it snowed very soon after that, or they saw it was going to snow, they would get out there and saw about a quarter of an inch off the end of the tie, cutting the marking off. Then I would come in and count that same doggone pile of ties. Historical

Some of those boys were really rough. When I would catch them, they would threaten me in every kind of way, but weHistory got along pretty well.

The gypos would contract to do station work or fell logs or cut ties. We would also contract for loading ties on cars and we would pay them a cent a tie. That meant taking a tie from the pile alongside the track, climbing up on the car with it and loading it, just with muscle--no pulleys or no equipment of any kind. On piece work like this, a good tie cutter, at eighteen cents a tie could make six Forestor seven dollarsMinnesota a day. The station men sometimes made as high as seven dollars a day. At that time we were paying only about fifty-four dollars a month in the woods. The regular crewmembers who were paid fifty-four dollars a month did the swamping.

The rate of fifty-four dollars a month was standard at that time, but it varied according to the market. If lumberjacks were harder to get, of course the market went up. The logging companies got together and sat down. It might have been illegal, but the rate was pretty much the same throughout the woods--they would talk to each other about that. We provided food and lodging-- lodging such as it was--and of course, the tools as well, and we kept the saws sharp for them. But

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the gypos, the contractors, had to keep their own saws in shape. We kept the saws in shape for the sawyers who cut logs, but not for the tie contractors; they kept their own saws filed and set. There were no power saws at that time at all. The story up there at that time, one that gave the jacks a great deal of amusement, was that Henry Ford had some logging camps over in Wisconsin, and that they had power saws in there, electric lights in the camp, single bunks, iron bunks, bathrooms--very modern--but that it was costing Henry up to forty to fifty dollars a thousand to cut his timber, and here we were cutting it up there all the way from ten to fifteen dollars a thousand, and so it was possible. Well, he could afford it.

But it set standards, because later on when the woods became unionized--in 1937--those were the standards that the union men imposed: One, that when the lumberjack got into camp, he got a single bunk, clean bedding--something that somebody else had slept under before. In the old camp, he got the blankets which probably six, seven or eight jacks had slept under before. Of course, we had muzzle-loader bunks. When they built the camps, on either side of this tar paper shack, they built shelves, seven feet wide. There were two shelves, the lower bunk and the upper bunk. The men slept next to each other horizontally all the length of theProject camp. Two men slept under each set of blankets. Each two men got three blankets. The only bedding underneath the blankets was hay or straw. Each camp would hold probably eighty men.

Our camp was up in the Cloquet area, but all of the camps at that timeSociety were similar in nature. Ours was by no means modern; even in those days it wasn’t a modern camp. What we had in this particular camp was an office building made out of logs,History next to it a cook camp made out of rough lumber covered with tar paper, and next to that a sleeping camp built similarly to the cook camp. There was a filing shack, also made out of logs, and then a long barn made out of big white pine logs. Those were salvaged for lumberOral after the camp broke up. Alongside of the barn was the blacksmith shop, and that was also made of logs. The roofs, of course, were all made out of tar paper-covered rough lumber. Chinking was made from mud with a little bit of cement mixed into it, and cut up hay--sometimes manureHistorical was used. On the inside, the chinking was split wood, just like Stove wood, wedges and pieces that were about two and a half feet long were pounded in on the inside and then the chinking of mud with a little bit of cement mixed in went on the outside. History

The buildings were very well built. One cabin at Camp One, although we had it for a one-year operation, was sold to a man by the name of Anderson, as I recall it, who was going to take it down and put it up over on some lake just north of Duluth, but unfortunately before he got it down the whole camp burned. It was a typical office building, and those were typical buildings that you wouldForest find inMinnesota the logging camps of those days.

In the cook camp, the cook was the major domo and the men obeyed him. The cook had helpers who were called cookees. When the meal was ready, he would either coot a big horn, a horn about seven feet long, or else he would hit a triangle made out of an old crowbar. The men would file into the shack, sit down at the tables; the foreman and the clerk always sat at the head of the table opposite each other. The cookees, who were the waiters, would walk up and down on either side of the table, and just as soon as any food container was empty, they would grab it, run for

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the kitchen end of the camp and fill it up.

The men never dared talk. It was absolutely against the rules for the men to talk while eating except to say, “Please pass the meat,” “Pass the potatoes,” or, “Please pass the bread.” If any man started a conversation, the cookees and the cook would get him by the scruff of the neck and out he would go. I’ve heard several explanations of the idea behind that. Number one is that the cook and cookees are pretty busy, and want the men to get out and get the meal over quickly so that they can clean up and get ready for the next meal. Another thing--is that if the men were carrying on an interesting conversation, probably the cookees would listen in and wouldn’t be so prompt in filling up the empty dishes. What the origin of the custom is, I don’t know, but no one ever dared talk. Once in a while, you would see whispered conversations, but you would see the cook, who stood at one end of the camp with his arms akimbo, glare over there and start walking toward them. These men were as afraid of the cook as any child ever was of the schoolmaster. I would suppose that that rule still holds. A lot of these customs undoubtedly still are maintained in the woods. Of course, just as soon as you were through eating, you had to get up and walk out. Those men can wolf that food down. Project

Then, of course, when they are way out in the woods, their noonday meal is hauled to them. Or if they’re building railroads, the noonday meal is put in big containers and hauled to them on a railroad speeder. I could tell you some interesting experiences on a railroadSociety speeder hauling food out, because as clerk of the camp, I used to go out at noon and check the men in my time book. One time on this job between Milepost 25¼ on the D History& NE, and the Cloquet River, we were hung up by having two moose on the track, and they wouldn’t move. One other time we were speeding along when it was windy. The track, of course, was under these big tall trees and dry limbs would fall down in front of the speeder.Oral Several times I have been derailed by having a limb fall down in front of the speeder, one time with a load of dynamite in caps in my back pocket--we all went into the ditch. Historical They had a very good variety of food. We had a root cellar in back of the cook camp, built in the side of a hill, that we loaded up in the fall with potatoes, turnips, root stock, carrots, and so on, so that they had that kind ofHistory vegetable. We didn’t have fresh vegetables as we know fresh vegetables today. In the wintertime we had fresh meat--beef, pork. As a matter of fact, we had bought hogs from the farmers nearby and butchered them right in camp. We also fed hogs in camp with the swill, fattened them up and butchered them in the spring. It was hard to keep hogs because there were a lot of bears up there and they had to be protected from the bears. I remember one morning the bull cook came in all excited and said, “Well, the bear got into the pigs last night.Forest He climbedMinnesota over the fence, with the pig under one arm and the lantern in the other and got away.”

I said, “That can’t be so.”

He said, “It is so. One of the pigs is gone and the lantern is gone.”

What really happened was that one of the jacks decided he didn’t want to work in the camp, and to light the way through the woods to the road, ha had stolen the lantern. Without the lantern in

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the pig pen, of course, the bear had come in and grabbed one of the pigs. But the cook had the bear climbing over the fence with the lantern in one hand and the pig in the other.

We had canned goods of all kinds. We had fruits of various kinds--prunes, of course. The lumberjacks called prunes “goongleberries”. Prunes were fed in the morning as a breakfast dish with cereals, well-cooked oatmeal, once in a while some other prepared root cereals, coffee, tea, cookies, and cakes. The cooks, of course, baked their own bread, cookies, and cakes.

The cooks were quite well paid. As I recall it, the cooks were paid about one hundred, one hundred and twenty-five, and one hundred and fifty dollars a month. The men drank coffee and tea both. Of course, we had no milk. I did buy some powdered milk called “klim”--”milk” backwards- - but the men didn’t go for that at all. At that time it hadn’t been developed like our present powdered milk. Of course, we had evaporated milk and used that in our coffee. The men would punch holes in the top of the can, and the can was put on the table. Sometimes it was dumped Out of the can and put into pitchers. Project There were flapjacks, by all means. I heard at that time, the Paul Bunyan story that later got into print. Paul Bunyan, of course, always did things in most gigantic sort of a way. He had a huge device for making pancakes, a big hopper into which he poured the dough. Underneath were this huge frying pan or skillet and two colored cookees who greased the pan.Society The colored cookees strapped bacon on their feet and skated around the pan. When the pan was greased, they just opened up the hopper, let the batter come down, and madeHistory these tremendous big flapjacks. That went all very well until one day one of the lumberjacks found two raisins in his flapjack, and that’s how they discovered what happened to the poor cookees, who accidentally let the valves open while they were still skating around. Oral

There are a lot of Paul Bunyan stories. They have been gathered and published, and they are excellent. But at that time, there were very fewHistorical of them published--they went from mouth to mouth. The stories went around particularly when the men sat around on the landings, waiting for the sleighs to come in for unloading. They would sit in little shelters that they themselves had built out of spruce boughsHistory and poles, and they would tell stories. Many of them I’m sure, never have been published. I can recall one of them, though this is not a Paul Bunyan story at all. One of the boys was trapping rabbits, and on Sunday he would go into Duluth and sell them, these great big white snowshoe rabbits. He would come into the logging camp with a gunnysack full of rabbits that he had taken out of his snares. The jacks were kidding him about snaring rabbits, because he had to go out and set the snares first, and that took work, and then he had to go out andForest pull the rabbitsMinnesota out of the snares. One of the jacks said, “Now, the way you ought to do it, is the way I catch rabbits. Take a big piece of lumber crayon and go out into the newly cut areas. Just put a big black bull’s eye on the end of all the logs. Then go and beat the bush a little bit and the rabbits, of course, thinking they’re getting away, will jump for what they think is a hollow log and will beat their brains out against the ends of the logs. Then all you have to do is go around and pick them up, with no trouble with snares or unloosing them.”

Another jack said, “That’s an awful waste of time. You should catch rabbits the way I catch them. I go out in the woods when it’s bitter cold and build little fires throughout the woods.” He

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said that the rabbits, being desirous of a little warmth on cold winter nights, would come in to the fires. One of them first would get there and hold up his paws to the fire, and pretty soon others would come around, and so around all these fires would be a circle of rabbits, warming their paws. The fires would go down, and the snow would melt and get slushy, and when the fires went all the way down, of course the slush would freeze. The jack said, “All I do in the morning is go around to these circles and yank them out by the ears with no trouble at all.”

These kinds of stories where each one tried to outdo the other were common in the area. It used to be interesting to sit and listen to them.

The Swedes were great snuff chewers and the Finns also. I think probably the Swedes were the greatest consumers of Copenhagen “snoose”. I had one customer who would come in every day for a roll of Copenhagen snuff--a roll consisted of eight boxes. He must have eaten it night and day. Then, of course, we also sold a great deal of chewing tobacco, Battle Ax Chewing Tobacco. The cook camp, of course, had the big stoves in one end, but in the early days my dad, who also worked in the woods, told me that they didn’t have stoves in the cook camp:Project they had big open fires with an opening in the ceiling. They had pots hanging around on these open fires. But we had huge stoves that were dragged into the woods and brought from camp to camp. They were always heavily greased with bacon fat after the camp closed in the spring to keep them from rusting. Society

The chopping block was made right in the woods out Historyof hard maple. The carpenter or one of the lumberjacks would make it. A good many of the items in the camp were actually made by the lumberjacks themselves. For instance, the dray sleds that we used to skid all timber, small stuff, were made by lumberjacks with an ordinaryOral hand ax. They would go out and cut maple trees down about the size they wanted and for the turn they would go down into the root. That made a good solid hard piece for the dray runners. Oftentimes when in the woods, I would be sent over to check on the number of sleds available up inHistorical the warehouse, and there would be no wood parts available at all, just the iron parts. They had to be made up in camp later on from these iron parts. Getting back to the cook camp, the food was prepared in the back end and the men ate in the front end. The cook in theHistory back end and the men ate in the front end. The cook and cookees had their bunks in the front end of the camp, too.

The sleeping camps were great long tar-paper covered lumber shacks, sometimes log huts, heated by a big round boiler-type stove set up in a box filled with sand. This stove was located about one third the way from one end and then a stovepipe about ten feet up would extend another thirdForest the lengthMinnesota of the camp and then out through the roof. They did that to get as much radiation from the stovepipe as possible. Then they had tamarack poles on either side of the pipe and there the jacks hung their stockings, wet underwear, and so on, to dry out. This drying out process, particularly when the snow was wet, caused the whole top of the camp to be just full of steam. When the fire died down, that steam or moisture would freeze and there would be white hoar frost all over the ceiling of the camp. When the sun would get on the roof in the morning, it melted and it would drip down onto the bunks. That’s why you had a very musty smell in most sleeping camps in the woods. The sleeping camp was closed up tightly, never had any windows open. The jacks said, “We get plenty of fresh air in the daytime. At night we want warmth and

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comfort.” At night, after supper, they would sit on the bench, which was along the lower tier of bunks, just talking and, if not talking, chewing tobacco and spitting right on the floor. Another group would be sitting around the stove, the tobacco-chewers particularly, and they would spit on the stove. So the big stove was always caked with a heavy brown layer of tobacco from the spitting. They would spit, spit, spit on the stove and in the sandbox.

Then, of course, the washing facilities were in one end of the camp, merely a sort of flat trough. They had five or six washbasins hanging up on the wall. The jacks, I’m sorry to say, were not the cleanest people in the world. They would walk around in that tobacco juice on the floor barefooted and climb right into their bunks. They didn’t mind that at all. Nowadays, the camps are entirely different.

The filing shack was the domain of the saw filer, and he was quite a dignitary in the camp. The building usually had a big wide window in front so that he would have plenty of light to file and set the saws by. Project The barns, big, long, lot structures, had a place in the center for hay. We had to ship the hay in baled. There were oats; the horses were rationed very carefully on oats. As I remember it from the cost accounting data that I kept up there, it cost more to keep a horse than it did a man in the woods that is, feeding them and caring for them. Society

The blacksmith shop was a very interesting part of theHistory camp, in that, these logging blacksmiths could make most any- thing you wanted--all of the hardware, the locks, hasps and so on, were made by the blacksmith, and any fittings that were needed to build a sleigh or to repair a sleigh, he could fix. He would pound on that old anvilOral and make most anything that you wanted. As a matter of fact, this blacksmith made a beautiful pocket knife for me. I got an old knife with broken blades, turned it over to him, and he made the blades out of old files and did just a beautifully polished job. Historical

By eight o’clock, most of the jacks were in their bunks sound asleep. In the wintertime, when you’re working quite a wayHistory from camp, you get up and get out in the woods before daylight, you eat your noonday meal out in the woods, and you come back in camp when it’s dark. The only time you see the camp in the daylight is on Sunday.

Of course, there are some jacks who are clean, and the boiling-up process is quite a procedure. They get a great big lard can from the cook camp and they build themselves a spruce bough shelter downForest by the lakeMinnesota near a hole in the ice where they get the water for the road-icing tank sleigh. They get their dirty clothes, put them in the lard can, put soap and water in there and boil and boil and boil. Some of the more handy souls will bring their underwear down there, take off their old clothes, put them in the lard can and then soap themselves up well, go out on the ice, and then jump in the hole and rinse off the soap that way, right in the icy water, and then run screaming for the shelter, rub themselves off and put on clean underwear. But only the hardiest souls did that, of course.

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There were quite a few bedbugs in the camp, and they were vicious bedbugs. I got into a camp one time when I was walking cross country, a beautiful camp that had been abandoned, but the office was still there. There were some blankets in the place. I got a fire going in the stove. But all the bedbugs! I had my shirt buttoned over the top of my head, kept my socks on, and had a pair of socks over my hands to keep them from eating me up.

Where there are a lot of bedbugs, some camps had a rather interesting way to decontaminate. They sometimes build a rail siding up close to the camp and then put a steam hose from the locomotive into a hole in the side of the camp and just steam the camp out for all it’s worth. There are a lot of vermin in most lumber camps, but we didn’t have very many. In new camps, they don’t have a chance to multiply like they do in an older camp. There were quite a few body lice. The toilet facilities we had, had no toilet seats as such. You just had to sit across a pole, like an army latrine. But they had the biggest roll of toilet paper in the world. They would slice off about a four inch wide piece off a roll of newsprint. They would have this whole big roll put on a peg in the toilet, and that would be enough to last almost all winter, and not very expensive. Project I was very much concerned about accidents, because it’s the clerk’s job to be more or less the first aid doctor of the camp. I had never been in touch with many accident areas, and I just feared so much that somebody would get under the railroad cars. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. But we did have accidents, and of course, the clerk had a first aid kit up thereSociety and was supposed to repair the man as best he could till they could get in town. History The most common accident was crushing by logs. There weren’t very many cuts with axes. There would be cases of a flying chip, for instance, hitting a person in the eye. Then there would be a case of rolling logs crushing. We had Oralone case where a man just tried to destroy himself. He came into camp with a pretty good case of snakes. During the night, he had fallen over a cut where we had put the railroad through a hill, and apparently broken his hip. Evidently, he tried to crawl and eventually did crawl into the barn, butHistorical when he got into the barn, he suffered so much that he had tried to kill himself and had stabbed himself in the chest about twenty times. We didn’t know there was anything wrong with his hip. Some of these chest wounds were bubbling a good deal and he was bleeding,History so we knew he had punctured his lungs. When we rolled him up in a blanket so that we could take him into Duluth, he was complaining an awful lot about his leg dragging. His leg wasn’t dragging at all. We didn’t find out until after we had gotten into the hospital in Duluth, that his hip had been broken.

It’s amazing how few accidents there were on the place. We had one man on a drive hook himself withForest a peaveyMinnesota just above the Adam’s apple and up through his chin, but we patched that up and he was back late that afternoon. The doctor said it was a pretty good job of suturing; I felt pretty good about that.

Every now and then we would get an outbreak on boils in camp. I used to lance them for the jacks and take the heads out. But the general health of the jacks was good. Every once in awhile a lumberjack would come up with a bad cold and would infect others. There was a good deal of coughing, spitting and hacking, but we had no way of isolating them. We never had anybody die in camp, fortunately for me. Chris Lee, who was the foreman there, said in the camps that he

11

worked in the year before, he had just brought one corpse into town, who had been a man killed by a falling tree, and got back just in time to take another one back. I was always afraid of railroad accidents.

Morale was good. They didn’t expect much in the way of back slapping and they didn’t get very much. They were tacit urn. There was no great joviality in the woods, ever. They were just hard working, serious-minded men. We treated them fairly and gave no special privileges to anyone. They didn’t mind the worst kind of work. They didn’t mind, for instance, because they knew they had to do it. On the log drives, when the logs had gone over the banks and into swamps, wading waist deep out and breaking ice ahead of them, was just part of the job.

The life had a great fascination for some men. The funny part of it is, they saved their money during the winter, and with few exceptions, would go in to town on a big toot, spend all their money in a week, and be back in the camp again, broke.

We never had any trouble with liquor in the camp. They knew they weren’tProject supposed to bring it up. A jack might bring as much as a pint up, but I never saw any great quantities of liquor, Of course, this was during prohibition days, remember. Once in a while a bootlegger would get in to a camp somehow. Society (Break in Recording) History Let me tell you about the White Face River drive which we took out in 1924. This drive was on the White Face River and originated up at a dam near Markham, Minnesota, north of Two Harbors. The White Face River flowed forOral one hundred and twenty-five miles into the St. Louis River, just above Floodwood, Minnesota. The drive had been stuck there for seven years. For seven years they had put logs into the river and they never had enough water to get the logs comp letely down to the booms below FloodwoodHistorical on the St. Louis River.

So when Chris Lee, Jack Campbell and myself were pledged to run this job, Mr. Campbell (Jack’s father), was insistentHistory that we get it out. Chris and I went up there before the ice was out, and walked the length of the river and looked over the dams. Chris decided that if we conserved on the water and got a timetable of just where the water would be when we let a spurt out of the dams, and if we used the water only in the daytime, we could get them out, and we did.

Let me say something about the operation of a drive. The logs are landed on the banks of a river. SometimesForest they are landedMinnesota on lakes that are connected with the river. In the spring when the ice goes out, the logs are rolled down into the river from these great big rollways. Usually, the rollw ays are alongside the river in a good level spot stretching for as much as a half mile or a mile. We also had pulpwood in the drives, which makes it exceedingly difficult for the drivers because in trying to walk on the logs on the rivers, they’ve got to twinkle their toes over sticks of pulpwood and try to stay afloat until they reach the next log.

Well, the rollways are broken out in the spring as soon as the ice goes off the river and the logs are started down. The rear crew--and they call the function of the rear crew “sacking the rear”--

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has the job of cleaning up the river as they go. That means that every stick of pulpwood, every log-- even though the logs, as a result of the river overflowing, might be out a quarter mile in the woods, and even hanging up in the trees--must be cleared up. The sacking crew, of course, which has the Wannigans, the cook camp and supply Wannigan, following them down, and sometimes a sleeping wannigan, as well. On the White Face, we didn’t have sleeping Wannigans; we merely pitched camp every night in a suitable place on the bank of the river.

Wannigan is a two-meaning word in the woods: Wannigan means a floating cook camp and it also means the small stores that are usually sold by the clerk out of the office of the logging camp. It’s just one of these words that has two meanings in the woods.

The function of the rear crew was to loosen the logs from the sides of the river. In the rapids, usually there are huge jams on the shore and oftentimes there are center jams. One thing that you often hear about in literature is “dynamiting the jam”. Well, they rarely use dynamite to loosen a jam. They use dynamite to blow out obstructions in the river, but we never used any dynamite. They just wouldn’t permit it; that destroys good timber. Project

Then another misnomer is the “key log”. There is no such thing as a key log. What happens in the jam is that a log or two will get stuck on a rock and other logs come in and jam behind it. They pile up, and the water piles up behind, and you might have a jamSociety in a rapids as high as f if- teen feet high in the middle. The only way to loosen the jam is to unpile the top logs and roll them into the current, so that the bottom ones can floatHistory out, and that’s what they do. A jam can be loosened up with remarkable speed. I’ve seen a jam a quarter mile long loosened up by two men in a matter of twenty minutes. Once they get them going, it doesn’t take long. Oral In addition to the “sacking crew”, that is the rear crew; they had the “beat crews”. The beat crews are men who walk along each side of the river on the banks and see to it that there are no obstructions in the river and that the logs are flowingHistorical smoothly. One beat will be about fifteen to twenty miles in length. They can walk back and forth in one day, if they start out at six in the morning and come back at seven at night. They cook their own tea and carry their own food with them for the midday mealsHistory--have four meals a day on the drives--and work from six until seven at night. The salary scale at the time of the White Face drive was two dollars and a half per day. Why they ever worked for that kind of money, I don’t know, except that the lumberjacks enjoyed the excitement as much as I did, and if they did, they did, they were looking for a drive to go to, as I did. When I was teaching at the University of Chicago, I went up on a drive in 1937 incognito--I didn’t let them know that I was a teacher, or my life might have been miserable up there. I lookedForest like theMinnesota rest of the jacks, and I think, probably, worked like them and got along all right.

There is rather interesting nomenclature on the drive. For instance, the other side of the river from the one that you’re on is always called the “Canadian side”. Anyone working over there is called a “Canadian”. The men who don’t dare work out on the logs in the river, but who are perfectly good workers on the bank, are called “bank rats”. The old timers separate themselves from the neophytes on the rivers at a different campfire. Getting accepted into the old-timers’ campfire circle is almost as difficult as getting accepted in a fraternity at college. You avoid it

13

very carefully, until you’re invited in. I felt very much honored when I was invite d in to the old- timers’ circle; believe me.

There are two main tools that are used on the drive. There is the pike pole, which is a pole about fifteen feet in length that has a sharp metal point to it with a slight screw shape on it. You throw the pole into the log to push and when you pull the poke pole out, you give it a turn. That screw shape helps unloosen it.

The peavey is a lever and a tool. It has a hook on it like an ice tong on a swivel, and on prying the end of the handle, which is about four or five feet long, is a sharp metal point. The skillful drivers and woodsmen can open up that hook by merely giving it a fast turn. The centrifugal force opens up the hook. They can snag a log beautifully with it.

Another very beautiful thing to watch is how they let go of the log with that peavey. You’ve got to be able to let go as well as grab on. These logs have a tremendous power when they’re pushed by water. I never realized how much power, until we were trying to pushProject the Wannigan s up stream with a couple of rowboats with outboard motors on them, Of course, what happened was that floating logs would get under the Wannigan, float down under the rowboats, go up against the propeller, and shear the pins off. I thought all I had to do was get a pike pole out and push them aside. I found that was a lot harder to do than I had expected. It Societyjust couldn’t be done with a log of any size. They had tremendous power in a current. After that, I had an awful lot of respect for the floating log, and certainly in shallow water wouldn’tHistory want to be near one of those things when it came down on me, because it could be very dangerous. That’s how most people are hurt by logs in drives; it isn’t the deep water or it isn’t by one log bumping against another and having you in the middle. It’s having a logOral roll over you in shallow water.

When a man becomes adept at driving and becomes accepted he’s called a “white water man”, particularly if he is a good man in rapids on logs.Historical Frankly, I’ve never seen a really good man in the rapids on a log--they all fall off, just as I did.

One skill you don’t hear aboutHistory but which the jack’s talk of a good deal is the skill of wading when the water gets up slightly above their knees. Other men can work in water and seem to handle themselves quite well and keep their feet on the bottom with fast water running around their armpits. How they do it, I don’t know; I’m not a good wader personally. When the water gets above my knees, I begin feeling out of balance. I think a slender person, a person who is not as buoyant, and who hasn’t got as much surface against which the water can run, has an advantage.Forest Minnesota

Log driving can be an awfully miserable job, particularly when it’s cold. It usually is cold in the spring, and always freezes at night. You wake up in the morning--of course, your shoes and socks were wet when you went to bed, and its miserable trying to dry them over a campfire; you just can’t do it--and your socks are stiff unless you’ve worn them all night, which I usually did. Your shoes are frozen stiff and you’ve got to manipulate them to get into them. Your underwear is rough and damp, you sleep in it, and it gets miserably cold at night. I’ve actually cried and shuddered in pain, and thought sure I must be dying from the misery of going to bed wet and

14

bitterly cold.

Then you had to get up in the morning and wade and break ice in front of you with your peavey to get out some doggone logs that had floated someplace where they shouldn’t.

The Wannigan follows the sacking crew, the crew that cleans up the river. When they get to white water, that is the most fun, and that is when the jacks enjoy themselves. The Wannigans go shooting through the rapids.

On the last drive I was on, we had all of our personal packsacks in one of these sleeping Wannigans that was merely a tent pitched on a raft, and wouldn’t that doggone thing get hooked on a snag, the lower end go down, and the whole river go through the tent, wetting down the knapsack of everybody in the crew, except the cooks--the cooks had their packsacks in their own Wannigan. That was excitement, when you put the Wannigans through the rapids loaded down. You float them down before the rapids are cleaned out, leaving the “wing jams” on these rapids in order to narrow the channel, as rapids are always wide and shallow placesProject in a river. So you leave the “wing jams” till last and pull the logs in from the back through the narrow channel made by the wings. Sometimes, the Wannigans hit against the butt ends of logs that are sticking out in wings. So everybody wonders what’s going to happen to the Wannigans when they go through the white water. Society

The men who guide the Wannigans through the rapidsHistory are selected men. The Wannigans have big sweep oars on either end that are supposed to help to guide them. There are sometimes up to four men on each one of these oars, which are about twenty feet in length and hewed out in one solid piece. When attempting to keep that WanniganOral straight, it’s hopeless to try to use a pike pole and ward you off; the current is just too strong for that. The Wannigans bump and thump against the wing jams on either side. They tip up in the air, first one corner, then one end--it’s a circus. They’re very strongly built, fortunately.Historical

When you go down the St. Louis River, it’s a very smooth, calm river, and the logs barely moved up above Floodwood. WeHistory just left the logs in the booms between Floodwood and Cloquet. Later, they were pulled out of the mill ponds and lifted into the mills by conveyor. The pulpwood was hoisted out and brought to the paper mills. At the time I was there, in the early 1920’s, I think, there were about four or five lumber mills operating in Cloquet and one or two paper mills.

I was able to ride the logs down the middle of the stream during the last part of the drive. During the first partForest of the drive,Minnesota I was a miserable white -water man--I was in the white-water all right, but usually up to my neck until I learned. Actually, I think that it’s more difficult to learn how to walk on logs and work on logs than it is to walk a tight wire. I’m sure of this. I’ve tried both. Floating logs are very unstable. They spin and turn like they want you off. Some of the old timers can walk on a log and it won’t turn or spin at all, and how they do it, I don’t know. But how I did envy them. It wasn’t until the very last days of the drive that I felt that I was fairly good on logs.

15

When you go off the log and a log piles into you, you get wet. The first thing you learn is to go for one end of the log, because it’s impossible to get up on a log in the middle. If you went to the middle, the log would keep on rolling and rolling and rolling and you never would get on it. You get on at one end and saddle it.

There isn’t nearly as much working on logs out in the river as most people imagine on a drive. Most of it is getting the darn logs in the river and floating down, and about the only time you have to work out in the river on logs, is when you’re caught out there and can’t get back to shore. Then, it was kind of handy to know how to walk on a log that was floating.

Logs that had stayed in the river for five years did not deteriorate. As a matter of fact, they have salvaged logs from the St. Croix River that had been there fifty years. As long as they’re under water, they don’t deteriorate.

Of course, there are certain kinds of logs you can’t put in the river. You can put in Norway, spruce and white pine, but you can’t put the hardwoods in and you can’tProject put balsam in. Balsam will very soon become waterlogged and sink. When they’re cutting pulpwood in the woods, balsam makes very good pulpwood, but if it’s going to be driven, they had better have some other way to get it out of the woods than on a river, because it will never get down to the mills. Society I never saw any hemlock in Minnesota, but as I understand it, there are only some very few stands of hemlock. In Wisconsin, yes, but not in Minnesota.History They wanted birch up in Minnesota. The Weyerhaeuser Company had quite a mill in Cloquet where they made these birch ends to put in rolls of wrapping paper and these birch trays that the butchers used for sausage meat. They also made toothpicks in Cloquet. All they wantedOral was the straight birch, and we cut the straight birch and sent that in. But you couldn’t put birch in the river; that had to be taken by railroad.

When the logs float down to the mill, they usedHistorical booms for herding the logs. To herd them, they also used a little steamboat that they call an “alligator”. They would swing the boom around a bunch of logs and haul them over to where they wanted them in the big boom. History We had a great deal of trouble on the White Face drive. We had a dam about fifty or sixty miles down from the head of the river, but we had quite a flowage--the flowage was about two and one half miles long and about one half mile wide. For three solid weeks, the wind blew up that flowage and the logs would not come down to the dams so that we could sluice them through. Mr. Campbell, the Weyerhaeuser Woods Superintendent, was horribly excited because here was this crew Forestof seventy-fiveMinnesota to eighty men tied up not doing a thing. As a matter of fact, I got orders three different times to pay them off and let them go to town and each time I didn’t do it, because I was so sure the wind was going to change the next morning.

Those few weeks that the wind blew up river, I remember we watched the loons, because people said you could tell from the way the loons flew what the wind was going to do. One day the loans circled and circled over the flowage, so one of the jacks said, “Well, we’re going to have a cyclone or a whirlwind or something.” But they finally floated down and we sluiced them through. We thought for a while that we would have to bring an alligator up there to round the

16

logs and haul them down, but fortunately we didn’t have to.

When we first had negotiations with the Weyerhaeuser’s, Jack Campbell and Mortitner Shiels represented the company--they were in partnership.

On the White Face drive, it was Jack Campbell, Chris Lee and I, who more or less headed up the operation. I handled the accounting and the business affairs and supply problems--and also worked on the river, because I enjoyed it. On the White Face River drive we worked for the St. Louis River Improvement Company. That was a separate corporation to limit the liability of the logging company, because every once in a while you flooded a farm and the logs would roll out into these farmers’ fields. I guess it wouldn’t hurt the Weyerhaeuser Company much if one of their subsidiary corporations, like the St. Louis River Improvement Company, would fold up. So, that was the “corporation” we worked for in the White Face River drive.

We never saw anyone from the St. Paul office. The only person we ever saw, even from the Cloquet office, was old man John C. Campbell, the Woods Superintendent.Project Every once in a while, one of their foresters would come up and look around. A young man recently out of the Yale Forestry School, wearing clothing that really marked him as being an office man, came up one day. He had high boots up to his knees, something never worn in the woods, and peg top boots--the kind of lumberjack you see in the movies. He was a real gentleman.Society

In the woods in the wintertime, we wore rubber shoesHistory with leather tops, a good suit of woolen underwear, about three pairs of heavy woolen socks, a woolen plaid shirt, a woolen jumper that had a double back over the shoulders, and a Scotch cap that had a peak on it, with ear laps. The top was heavily padded with cotton paddingOral to protect your head from falling branches. Then we wore woolen mittens inside of our good horsehide or buckskin mittens. Many of us had buckskin mittens that we made ourselves. As a matter of fact, Chris had shot a deer and had tanned the hide, and we had some women make up some goodHistorical buckskin mittens --I’ve still got them; they’re wonderful. They stay soft even after they’re wet and dry out.

These jumpers that we woreHistory were of mackinaw cloth, but they were lighter than the mackinaw. Some of the men wore a mackinaw type coat, but that was too heavy for working. The thing that the jacks kept in mind all the time was not to get too warm when they worked. They would peel off clothes, and when they stopped work they would put them on. It got awfully cold up there. We worked out in the woods when it was thirty and thirty-five below zero. When the food was brought out to us, we had to be very careful not to put a knife or a spoon or a fork up against our tongues beforeForest we warmedMinnesota it up, because it would stick to your tongue and pull the skin off your tongue.

The snow never got very deep. It got up to three feet sometimes, and I suppose that’s deep compared with what we have on the ground here. It did drift.

There wouldn’t always be regular jacks on drives. You take on quite a few fellows who can work only on the banks. You have farmers coming over to work on the drive. On the last drive that I worked on, we had one farmer who was called the “clover king”. He was a University of

17

Minnesota graduate and a very good log driver. He wasn’t good on logs in the river, but he was a hard worker, and very good with a peavey and a pike pole. Not all lumberjacks are log drivers, but all the log drivers also work in the woods in the lumber camps in the wintertime.

Working in the lumber camps could sometimes be a year round job. In the summertime, usually the job was building roads, laying track, cutting the ties for the railroad, and cutting pulpwood-- that could be hauled easily in the summertime. They didn’t log; we’d leave the big soft timber stuff until later on when there was snow for skidding and hauling.

Some of the cut-over land would naturally spring up in good second growth timber. Unfortunately what happened usually was this: the slash was piled up, a fire would run through it and the topsoil, the humus, would be burned off. Then erosion would set in. The country looked pretty sad after it had been logged off. In those days they logged off everything clean except the hardwoods. It really was desolate country after the logging operations up there in Minnesota.

They did have some good second growth, and it did come through whereProject there hadn’t been fires. There was a huge second growth up there, but it was poplar, and that would grow up so thickly, that the pine didn’t have much chance. A lot of that old second growth is just covered with “pople”. That “pople” isn’t much good for anything. It grows up tall, and can be used for box lumber. I believe they have now developed poplar for pulpwood, but Societyat the time that I was up there, it wasn’t even used for pulpwood. History There were no state laws regulating cutting, except one regulating cutting on school sections. These sections were scattered all through the woods. Some early law gave these school sections to the state schools, but they were very widelyOral scattered. We would get in touch with the state authorities and say, “We’re going to log this. Don’t you want the stuff cut off that school section?” Then we had to keep a very careful tab of all the stuff we cut on the school section. It would not even be a section. It would be a schoolHistorical eighty or one hundred sixty acres square. Even when you built railroad, sometimes you had to go through a school section and you had to keep a careful record of all the logs and pulpwood you cut in that section. All the property lines had been run by the cruisers andHistory surveyors beforehand, so you knew where you were.

Of course, in those days, they encouraged the river drivers to cut themselves a “beer log”. The beer log was one that was “accidently” cut on somebody else’s property and floated down with the drive. The jacks then, after a count of the “beer logs”, would get a barrel of beer for their logs. Exactly the same thing that happens to maverick cattle at round-up time out West. I was onlyForest in the gameMinnesota for about two years, but enjoyed it a great deal. The lumberjacks were such wonderful fellows. They would give you the shirt off their back any time. I tried to treat them right and I think they appreciated it. They’re honest people, and they would give you a day’s work for a day’s wages. You found very few loafers.

There were some. I took eight hundred feet of motion pictures on the log drive on the Little Fork, and I purposely got one fellow in the pictures quite often who was a real “gold bricker”. He was always walking someplace, always busy, but never did a tap of work. Half of those pictures are in color. Color film had just come out at the time I went up there, 1.937, and I tried it out--a good

18

deal of it is now faded.

Stewart Edward White is my favorite author. His stories of the lumber camps are very good, and so accurate. The timber cruisers that he spoke of were way in the past. The timber cruiser surveyed the timber to find out what should be bought. Then later on you had the cruisers who came in and would estimate the amount of timber on each forty. They were also surveyors. They would find a little corner post and mark your line for you, as to where your cut was and where the other person’s property was.

They led quite a life. They carried their camping equipment on their backs and had very interesting experiences to tell about, particularly with the bears. The black bears up in northern Minnesota are pests. I could tell stories all afternoon about the time we had with the bears in the camps. They weren’t dangerous unless you irritated them, cornered them or bothered their cubs; then you deserved what you got. But they got in the camps, and they love ham and bacon, and they can smell it a long way off. Project I do want to say something about the unionization of the woods. When I went up to Duluth in 1937, headed for the Little Fork drive, I was told by Jack Campbell, whom I stopped off to see, that the woods had just been unionized and that I would have to get a ticket in order to work on the drive. Well, Jack had sent up word to the people at the InternationalSociety Lumber Company that I was coming up. When I got there and called the woods foreman, he told me that I wouldn’t need a ticket because he was going to use me as a straw boss,History and straw bosses didn’t need a ticket. Anyhow, I went up to the union office and they gave me a ticket without any question at the desk. I was in my lumberjack driving clothes. But as I approached the door, a big Indian fellow got hold of me and said, “Look, there’s somethingOral funny about you. You know, this is a new union and we’ve got to be very careful about who gets in.” (I learned soon after that he was the Union Vice President.) Historical I said, “Well, that’s good. I’m glad that you’re very careful.”

He said, “Tell me about yourHistory background.”

I said, “You want to know whether I’m a log driver. I am.”

“What drive did you work on?”

I told him.Forest Minnesota

“Where did you work in the woods last?”

I said, “Brother, you’ve got me and I’m going to tell you the truth. I haven’t worked in the woods since 1924.”

He said, “Sorry, I’ll have to take your ticket away from you.”

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I said, “Well, I’m going up on that drive and work, ticket or no.” At that time I was a little bit peeved.

He said, “Well, I’m going up there myself tonight, and I’m going to see to it that you don’t.”

I said, “Will you let me ride with you?” It was an automobile ride of about one hundred and eighty miles. He thought I had an awful lot of nerve, but he said, “All right.”

We started out. We did a lot of talking on the way and stopped at every place where we could get a bottle of beer by the time we got up there, he said I was entitled to a ticket. I didn’t tell him that I was a professor at the University of Chicago. I told him I was working in Chicago, but I didn’t tell him what I was.

We got up there, and I learned a lot about what the union had done for the lumberjack. They had done a lot. They gave him a single bunk and clean blankets. Of course,Project the food couldn’t be improved because they always got good food; however, when the union was organized, the organizers said they were going to improve the food. “You’re going to have the same kind of food that the millionaires eat.” Society “But we get good food now.” History One of the organizers said, “Do you get grapefruit?”

The jack said, “No.” Oral

“Well, you’re going to get grapefruit.” That was written into the rules, as I understand it. So I got up to camp, and the grapefruit had justHistorical arrived there. There was a young cook up at the camp on the Little Fork River, about eighteen or nineteen years old, who had done a remarkable job. I was very busy that first night in camp, getting to know people and what was going on, what was going to happenHistory in the morning. The cook wanted to know how to fix the grapefruit. I said, “I’ll see you later on,” but I never did get to see him.

In the morning, I got into the cook camp and here on the table were these grapefruit piled up in big tureens. The jacks looked at them, and I heard one of them whisper, “Gees, what’s them?”

“Lemons.”Forest Minnesota

“Naw! Can’t be lemons. They ain’t got nipples on them.” So of course, the jacks at the table wondered what on earth they were going to do about these grapefruit. They thought probably they were something like oranges, so the first jack got up, looked up and down the table, and everybody looked at him, and wondered what he was going to do. Once in a while we used to get oranges in the woods, and we would take the oranges with us back into camp. So this jack grabbed a grapefruit, and every jack after that took a grapefruit, when they left the table and

20

carried them back into sleeping camp.

I thought I would go out to the sleeping camp and see what was going on, how they were going to react to these grapefruit. One of the fellows got a piece peeled off, big enough to get his teeth into, and he said, “My got, they’re green!” and he tossed it through the door of the camp out into the mud puddle outside. There was a regular hail of grapefruit through the door that landed out in front of the camp.

I went to the cook and told him that he should cut it in half and serve one piece at each plate. I would come in the morning the first thing, before any of the rest of them came in, and start eating mine so that they could see how they should be eaten.

I forgot that you can cut grapefruit in half and you can cut it in half, He had cut it the wrong way! If you think a grapefruit squirts when you cut it across, you ought to see what it does when you cut it the other way. There was almost a riot of laughter in the cook camp. Project The next day we were served grapefruit once more, and by that, the jacks would have no more of the grapefruit. So the steward of the camp, Curly Lord, who was an old fellow with whom I had driven logs on the White Face, went to the cook and said, “We want no more of these grapefruit.” Society

Another thing that the union brought to the lumberjacksHistory was the bathtub in camp. Two of them had been brought to camp and they laid out in the yard, but were never hooked up.

Another thing the union dictated was that theOral steward blew his whistle at seven in the morning, and no jack was supposed to start work until he blew his whistle. They were all supposed to drop their tools when he blew his whistle at night, at five o’clock. Well, the river keeps on running and the logs keep on going. Historical

Curly Lord had worked with my dad on the St. Croix River years and years before. He got awfully tired of the unionHistory rules, and he saw that this drive wasn’t going to go by the union rules at all. He was made a straw boss. He was tougher as a straw boss on the jacks that he was on the foreman as a steward for the union. After he was made a straw boss, there was no more steward. We went along and forgot about the union rules, and everything went very nicely.

The pay had improved considerable. On the White Face, the driving wage was two dollars and a half a day.Forest We workedMinnesota from six in the morning until seven at night. On this drive, as I recall it, the pay was five dollars a day and they worked from seven in the morning until five at night, with an hour off for lunch. Most of the time there were only three meals a day. On a drive, there are usually four meals a day.

On a drive at night, the logs just keep running along. They might jam up, but the beat crews go by in the morning and pick anything off that jammed up that might tie up the drive.

I didn’t hear very much about the process of unionization. They did have a little difficulty at

21

first, as I understand it. In the earlier days an attempt was made right after World War I to organize the IWW. They were not very successful at that. There was still IWW organizers up in the woods in the early 20’s. I chased one of them out of the woods before he even got to camp one day. The next time I met him was on the log drive. He was a very good log driver. He said that a clerk at one time had chased him out of the woods, and if he ever met up with him, he would kill the so-and-so. I never told him I was the clerk who had chased him out of the woods, and we became very close friends. When I chased him out, I had an ax in my hand, and I told him I didn’t want him in camp. I had been told that he was an IWW organizer, and that he was coming down the road. Somebody had recognized him. When you’ve got an ax in your hand, you can be quite persuasive.

January 8, 1955 Interview at Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City with Louis M. Starr.

Project The first step in the logging operation after the properties have been acquired is to look them over. Usually, that is done before they’re bought to get an estimate of the timber stand. Before establishing a camp, the cruisers have gone over the property and marked the property lines so that they know where to limit cutting. The woods area in northern MinnesotaSociety had been surveyed in the 1870s and 1880s, and even previously, so a good many of the wooden corner stakes had rotted away and were very difficult to find. The cruisersHistory were experts at locating corner stakes, and could find them even though they were rotted away, and even though the witness trees had disappeared. Oral Once the timber had been cruised and an estimate had been made of the number of board feet on each section, then the woods superintendent decided where in general, there ought to be a camp. The exact location of the camp is up to the foreman.Historical This is an important decision, because the location of the camp will determine in large part, how efficiently the logging can be done. A foreman will usually try to select a campsite somewhere in the center of the area so that the men will not have to travel tooHistory far from the camp to reach all the timber, and be well situated as the hub of a considerable network of logging roads and perhaps, a center of a railroad operation.

The camp is usually located near a lake or river, handy for the watering of the horses. A good source of drinking water for the crew is even more important. This may require the digging of a well. It isn’t often that a good reliable spring will be found that will supply enough water for the camp’s needs.Forest The campsiteMinnesota should be a fairly open place. Camp building can’t await clearing of the timber. These are just a few of the main factors involved in the important decision of selecting a campsite.

Once the campsite has been located, then of course, the camp building operations are started. Usually a small, advance crew goes into the woods in summer or early fall and builds a small temporary shelter, or sets up tents, cuts tote roads, and starts the camp building operation. Rough lumber and other building materials are hauled in to the camp location by tote wagon. It’s rare that a handsaw is seen or used in building camp. A lumberjack loves to cut into good lumber

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with a handsaw, so handsaws are kept away from the lumberjacks just as much as they possibly can to save good lumber.

The lumber used for camp building is of standard dimensions, that is, just the right length for the flooring, just the right length for the roofing. If the camps are going to be built, as they were in the 1920’s, of boards and tarpaper, the buildings are constructed to standard dimensions, hence the lumber provided is just the right lengths for the floor, for the sides, and the roof of the camp buildings. Usually, the office and the filing shack are small log cabins about eighteen by twenty- four. They’re built of logs about a foot in diameter. We were fortunate in the Campbell and Shiels camp where I worked, to find some excellent tamarack. Most of the tamarack had died off in Minnesota years and years before. However, tamarack withstands pests and rot much better than other woods. As a matter of fact, after it stands for about fifteen or twenty years in dead state, it gets glassy hard and makes excellent railroad ties and cabin timber.

The filing shack in this camp was also built of tamarack logs. Where we were, we found ample “down” timber--that is, windfalls--for our barn and blacksmith shop. AfterProject the camp was abandoned, the barn was dismantled and the timbers were salvaged for saw logs, loaded on cars and sent to the mill.

When one goes into a central warehouse and looks at the equipment thatSociety constitutes a “lumber camp”, at least for me, a tyro in the woods, it was a great surprise. It was pointed Out, over in one corner of this big old warehouse. The “camp” lookedHistory mostly like a lot of scrap iron, piles of saws, cant hooks, axes, picaroons, a couple of big rusty cook and heating stoves, and a lot of pots, pans, and other cooking equipment, dismantled sleigh runners, but mostly just a lot of rusty hardware. After the clerk takes an inventoryOral to be sure all the essential materials are there, all of it is hauled out to the woods when camp building operations begin.

The blacksmith shop equipment, for instance, isHistorical an anvil, a forge, hammers, tongs, and a lot of iron. A good blacksmith makes a good deal of the hardware equipment around the camp from rough iron stock. He makes hasps for the doors; he makes hardware for the various sleigh parts. The lumberjacks themselvesHistory hew and shape the wood parts of the sleigh runners. One rather customary thing in the woods was for the blacksmith to have his own lock for the blacksmith shop door that he himself had made. That was part of his personal equipment. The woods blacksmith takes pride in his lock. It was usually an exceptionally good lock, because the smithy had many of his personal tools, as well as those supplied by the logging company, to protect. The same was true of saw filers. Most filers had their little special tools and gadgets that they had ingeniouslyForest contrived,Minnesota to make their job a little easier.

The typical camp has been described in part: an office, a filing shack, a blacksmith shop, the barns, a cook camp, and a sleeping camp. A large camp, with more than seventy-five or one hundred men, would have two sleeping camps, and a much larger cook camp. The cook camps were usually about eighty, ninety or one hundred feet long and about thirty feet wide--forty feet wide sometimes. The tables were long tables that would stretch the length of the cook camp. Usually, there would be about three tables--one down the center, and and another one down each side. Each table would be about thirty to forty feet long. There were ordinary benches for the

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men to sit on, of course.

The equipment in the cook’s kitchen section, which was at the end of the cook camp, consisted of a couple of wood- burning stoves, huge mixing kettles, and a chopping block. Usually, the meat chopping block was made at the campsite of hard maple. Other woods were too pitchy and too brittle and would crack or split. Sections would be pegged together to make this huge meat chopping block with three Stout legs on it. That constituted the cook’s apparatus.

I should say this: the cook has a bunk, usually at the front end of the cook camp itself. He has curtains around it, so he has more privacy than any other man in the camp.

The blacksmith bunked in the blacksmith shop in a closet- like berth. Why he ever did that, I don’t know, because a blacksmith shop certainly is not the cleanest place in the world. In the early fall, when the horses are brought to camp, he has a tremendous task to shoe them all. The horses usually came in without shoes on, and they had to be shod with special caulked or spiked horseshoes so that they wouldn’t slip on the icy roads. Project

I have touched briefly on logging road construction previously. Most of the road making was done by “contractors”; “gypo” men, as we called them up there. Just what the derivation of the term “gypo” is, I could never learn. Society

These “gypo” gangs, usually from five to ten men, wereHistory a very close-knit social group. They were a crew apart from the others, rarely associating with regular crew members, and usually they were of the same nationality. There was a Swedish “gypo” gang, very well-known at the time I was in the woods, called the GylandOral Gang. Andrew Gyland was head of that gang. He had several brothers with him.

The gang is usually named after the man who isHistorical its spokesman. One of the reasons they got into the “gypo” game is that they found out that by working a little harder than the others a little faster, they could contract out and make more money than daily wages. History The “gypos” were “road” men until the time came when there was no more gypo work remaining to be done in camp. Then they might stay in camp as sawyers or swampers, or they might, as the lumberjacks say, “dangle” and go to another camp, looking for work.

In Duluth, on West Michigan Street, you have the various placement offices for workers in the woods, andForest in front ofMinnesota these placement offices --and they’re fairly crude offices-- are the blackboards, listing jobs available. They’ll list “cook” and they’ll indicate the salary. “Gypo men wanted”, and the jacks will know what that means.

Gypo men bid on the jobs in the woods. For instance, the foreman will go down to Gyland and say, “Andy, we’ve got a stretch over here we’d like to have you bid on. Let’s go out and look it over.” (Incidentally, they also call the “gypos”, “station men”, because the unit of contract for their work is one hundred feet, and that’s one station. So the foreman might say, “I’ve got ten

24

stations I’d like to have you bid on.”)

They would go out and walk over the place where the road should go. The only markings to indicate where the road is to be built are three-foot stakes in the ground. Those were placed by the foreman; the foreman himself lays out the roads. There were no college-engineers to lay out the logging roads. Sometimes there would be two or three gyppo gangs in camp. The foreman might take them out and have all of them look at a road site and have them bid competitively on the job.

It’s amazing how low the prices were for the road building up in the woods. For ordinary railroad right of way, a station would be contracted out for anywhere from four dollars to ten dollars, for one hundred feet. A railroad grade does not have to be built nearly as carefully, nor as level, as a sleigh haul right of way. There’s cutting down all of the trees that are in the way, blasting out the stumps, the stones, leveling the grade, and making it ready to put the ties and steel down. Of course, they never put gravel ballast under the ties of a logging railroad, unless the road is going to be used for some years. Project

The task of laying out the roads is one that requires a good deal of skill. The sleigh haul roads all radiate out from the landing. The landing is the place where the logs are yarded, ready for loading on the railroad cars. The landing is located just as close to theSociety camp as possible. As a matter of fact, in determining where to put the camp, a good landing location is a very important factor. History

The sleigh haul roads, as I have said, had to be built with much more care than the railroad right of way. The reason for that is that one teamOral of horses was used to haul a sleigh load of logs. The sleigh is a huge vehicle. It had runners that were eight feet apart from rut to rut, and “bunks”, the bed of the sleigh, about sixteen feet wide. These were loaded up ten or twelve feet high. So one team of horses had a terrific load to pull. The onlyHistorical reason that they could pull such a load was that the roads were iced. By spring, the sleigh haul roads would have a paving of two to three feet of ice on them. History One of the most amazing things to me was to see how straight they could cut the ruts on these iced roads. A special device called a “rutter” was used for this purpose. Some of the men up there were experts in guiding the rutter so that the ruts in the ice road were just as straight as any railroad track, and the curves were just beautifully done. There were never any wriggling ruts in a sleigh haul road. ForestMinnesota The contour of the country determined in large part, where these roads were located. The foreman would walk over and over and over the land to find as level a road way as he possibly could. Hills could not always be avoided. The foreman always tried to place the landing at the lowest place possible in the whole are, so that all the sleigh haul roads would have a tendency to be on the downhill grade to the landing.

However, in some places, hills had to be tolerated. In those areas, a little shelter would be constructed and two or sometimes three teams would be kept there to hook on to the loads to

25

help the two horse team up the grade. Downhill grades, if too steep, could be exceedingly dangerous. The road monkeys, the men who tend to the roads, played an important role in the downhill progress of the sleighs. The function of the road monkeys was to keep the roads clear of manure. When the sun beats down on the manure, it otherwise would melt right into the road and ruin the ice surface. So the logging camps had street cleaners out in the woods, but they didn’t wear white uniforms.

On the downhill grades, notches about eight inches deep were cut across the ruts about every four to six feet apart. In the notches hay was placed. When a loaded sleigh went downhill, they hay braked the forward progress so that the lead wouldn’t go downhill too fast and endanger the lives of the horses and the teamster standing on the runner cross piece in front of the great load of logs. The road monkeys would go ahead of the load, and the teamster would yell to them, “Take out hay, take out hay. Put hay in, put hay in,” to regulate the speed of the load. The road monkeys would scamper ahead of the load with forked sticks, and they would either put hay in or take out hay, as directed by the teamster. (Hay was usually piled by each one of these notches.) If the load would be going too slowly and the horses would have trouble Projectpulling it, even downhill, then they take out the hay.

Every now and then they wouldn’t judge it quite right and the sleigh load would get ahead of the road monkeys. Then the poor terrified teamster, to save his life, had toSociety whip the horses up to keep them ahead of the load. It just seems the horses knew what they’re up against when that happened. I only saw one such load get away. The horsesHistory came speeding down that hill panic stricken, and it seems to me the same expression was in the eyes of the horses as was in the eyes of the teamster, because the teamster knew, too, that if the horses ever stumbled going down that hill, it was the end for the horses and for himOral as well. The load of logs would surely have continued forward and crush them.

The few road monkeys in a camp had a rather niceHistorical soft job, particularly those who walked over the roads, picking up manure. The road monkeys stationed on the hills also had exciting times. The icing of the roads was done with a water tank on sled runners. The water tank was a huge square water container madeHistory out of large planks. The foreman once asked me to go down to the siding to see if the water tank had come yet. I reported back that it hadn’t come, just a big pile of planks. That was the water tank. The water tank was actually assembled in the woods of this material.

The actual icing of the roads was an interesting procedure. The water tank had to be loaded with water. ThatForest was usuallyMinnesota done at a lake. A hole was cut in the ice about four feet wide and about ten or twelve feet long. A team of horses pulls the water tank on to the lake next to and at right angles to the hole. On top of the water tank is an inverted v-shaped device to hold a pulley. A skid is rigged on the side of the tank, running from the waterhole up to the bottom of it on a swivel, is let down by a line through the pulley. The water tank team is unhitched and fastened on to the line that holds the barrel. The water tank man can command the horses. He doesn’t have anyone driving them; the horses just know what they’re supposed to do.

26

So the barrel comes down the skid into the water, he gives the horses a command, the loaded barrel goes up the skid, bumps up against a board up on the top and dumps the water into the tank. The horses back up, the barrel goes down again, and another load goes up and is emptied into the tank. This is continued until the tank is full. It seems a very inefficient way to do it. You would think they would have had a gasoline engine pump to lead the water wagon, but they didn’t; it was all done with muscle.

The tank, when full, is taken down the road with the runners in the ruts. There are several holes in the bottom of the tank, several poles extending through from the top, down to the bottom of the tank serving as plugs. The water tank man merely pulls the poles up and lets the water run to put the tank in operation. He works all night, because the water wagon can’t very well be on the sleigh haul roads when the log hauling traffic is going on.

It gets bitterly cold. He has one team, and sometimes two, because that water tank is pretty heavy. He goes uphill and downhill, but he arranges to go uphill when his load is light. Project There are sidings on the roads, because the teams do have to pass each other. The empties are going out to the woods and the loaded sleighs are coming back. These loads are scheduled; I don’t know whether they have any timetable, but it just seems in some way, they schedule them so that the empties are on the sidings and the loads go by. Society

I remember one night when the water wagon was out,History it got down to about forty-five below zero. The poor teamster had a bandana handkerchief around his face, with just his eyes showing--he was all bundled up. The moment he came in, he unwrapped the bandana handkerchief from his face, and the tip of his nose came off with Oralit, because it had been frozen white. It’s a miserable sort of life; however, they seem to enjoy it and they get a certain status out of having a job that is the only job of that kind in the camp. And they sleep while the others work. Historical There is just one man on the water tank, just the teamster. He loads the tank and pulls it along the roadway. There is usually one tank for a camp of about seventy-five men. We had about thirty- five miles of sleigh haul road.History Some of it was iced better than others. On the main road, I think we had something like twenty-five miles of main road, and that was very well iced. It’s a job that I certainly wouldn’t envy anybody.

In the spring, when the snow melts off, sometimes you get caught short. If you haven’t had a great deal of snowfall, it becomes necessary to actually haul snow in order to get the last logs out. That Foresthappened withMinnesota us at Camp #1, near Caribou Lake.

The water tank is on sled runners, the same width as the log-hauling sleighs, eight feet apart. Instead of having lanterns on the tank, they also have big kerosene torches. Big probably isn’t the right descript ion; they were torches that probably held two quarts of kerosene in round tanks about eight inches in diameter, protruding from two horn-like spouts. I had been out at night and watched the water tank come along with the torches glowing, one on either side of the tank. I could never understand why they used those torches, but everything was very primitive and it seemed that in the woods, they held on to the primitive things for some reason or other much

27

longer than they would anywhere else. Good lanterns would have been much better. It’s not that I think they needed any visibility at all; I think the horses would have taken him right where he wanted to go.

Well, so much for road making. Of course, the side roads were not built as well as the main roads. The railroads were very temporary and anything but level. There was, of course, the maintenance crew on the track. These tracks would slide down, and the spikes would loosen up on the curves, so they had to watch them very carefully. They shored them up with split birch pieces about two feet long. I recall when we were picking up the track after a job near Caribou Lake, there were hundreds and hundreds of cords of beautiful birch fireplace and cooking stove wood that was left right on the ground. There just wasn’t much of a market for it around there. If it could have been hauled into New York or Chicago, it would probably have sold at ten or twelve dollars a cord, which was a lot more than they got for the pulpwood that was harvested in that camp area.

The curves on the sleigh haul road are very gradual curves. As a matterProject of fact, they’re almost as gradual as railroad curves. The rut is about three inches deep in the usual roadway, and just as glassy as can be, because they pour fresh water on all the ruts every night. When they start the sleigh haul load, after the sleigh has been loaded, two men with mallets stand in back of the back runners and they Count--One, two, three, and both hit the back end ofSociety the runners together. The horses know, when the counting starts, that they’ve got to lean in and pull. They just seem to time that pull with the slam of those mallets or mauls,History and get that load off perfectly every time.

In building the logging railroad, the steel rails are shipped in after having been used on many other railroad jobs. We used some steel as Oralsmall as forty -five pound steel, and we had some as heavy as seventy-five pounds. So you had mixtures of steel on the same railroad.

The ties were cut right along the railroad. On a Historicalone or two year job, they usually were cedar or birch. Cedar is rather soft; birch also is rather soft, and ties of cedar or birch don’t last very long. Of course, the ties lie right on the ground, with no gravel ballast at all. History When ties began to give, then they put in a new tie or shored it up with split pieces of birch. They force the split pieces of birch underneath the tie, to level up the sinking rail. In the soft places, they would use big long poles, so quite a wide base was provided for the road bed. As a matter of fact, the landings are usually on very marshy ground, and they wait until the soft ground has frozen sufficiently to lay the track and run trains over it. ForestMinnesota The very temporary skid roads are usually cut out by the “swampers”, the men who lop the branches off the trees and pile up the slash. At the time that I was in the woods, new instructions came to the camp that we had to take everything as saw logs down to a three inch top. The previous top was four or five inches, as I recall it, and I remember the jacks complaining at that time, saying, “The next thing you know, they’ll be having us bail up the slash and dig out the roots and send those in to the mill too. Well, the swampers cut out these skid roads. The skid way was merely a path through the brush where you could get a team in, with a hook that had a pair of tongs that looked very much like ice tongs. They would put those on to the end of the log and

28

skid it on the ground to the temporary rollways, where they loaded the sleds. There they had what was called a woods jammer, a huge crude crane, a device for loading logs on the big sleighs, a jammer crew, and particularly a marvelous team of horses. The horses pulled the logs up on skids onto the sleighs. They’re really rolled up by the horses. As they pull on the end of the line that passed through a lower pulley, through another pulley at the top of this high, narrow, triangular crane, they can feel when the log has reached the top of the load and found its place on the load, and they stop. The horses turned right around and go back without orders. They knew right where to turn around, and wait until they are hooked up to load the next log. The same set of horses does this all the time. The so-called woods jammer is one kind of a jammer.

Another kind of a jammer is the steam powered crane that is used to load the logs from the landing onto the railroad cars. It is known as a “Clyde jammer”, a very interesting piece of machinery. All of the empty cars are set out at the end of the track on the landing. The jammer, of course, is moved up front. The empties are pulled through the bottom of the jammer and then let down on the other side, one at a time, just before being loaded. A great big triangular wooden boom sticks out over the top of the empty car. The line is pulled down Projectfrom a pulley over to the skid ways, and, depending on how large the logs are, they are pulled up probably three logs at a time or just the one, if it’s a large one. A top-loader stands out on the end of a narrow platform held up by ropes and guides these logs with a peavey so that they fall on the cars even and parallel. The “top-loaders”, the men who guide and place the logs on Societythe railroad cars with their peavies, are quite well paid. It is a dangerous job, because those logs come sailing up there at a good clip, and a top-loader might get knocked off. History

The jammer is powered by a steam engine. The top jammer man stands at his controls, looking out of a window and watches very carefully.Oral The “top-loader” stands on the end of his platform, and has two assistant operators on the car.

As mentioned before, the loaded sleigh is broughtHistorical to the landing, a big storage yard where the loads of logs are put on skid ways--that is, the logs are set down at right angles to the track so that the logs can be rolled right up to the jammer. Usually each rollway is about forty or fifty feet long, and the road comesHistory along the edge of the rollways.

The loads are brought in, and the stakes on the side are loosened up. The chains are loosened up and freed with a whiplash snap and the logs roll down on the other side onto the skids. A “jerry pole” on the opposite side is placed against the load so that the logs don’t roll off the other side when the chain is loosened. The landing men with the canthooks roll the logs down these skid ways so thatForest they-re allMinnesota very neatly arranged for loading.

The logs come onto the landing at quite frequent intervals. However, there are times when there is a little idle time between loads. Then the landing men gather in a little shelter, a crude shelter made out of poles and spruce boughs, and that’s where the storytelling goes on. They try to outdo each other on storytelling. They’re a rather taciturn group, not boisterous, not fast talkers. They do a little thinking before they say anything. Their language is colorful, and sometimes pretty rough--but certainly colorful. They also reminisce at times. They talk about ten years and twenty-five years ago, how much tougher it was in the woods than it was in earlier years. It was

29

a very interesting place. You should have had this tape recorder in one of those shelters on the landing; you would really have gotten stories that would have lent zest to logging history.

The scaler measures every log that’s brought to the landing. He had a line on his book for every single log, and he records the number of board feet in every log. The logs are stamped. By stamping, I mean they are marked on the end with a big hammer with sort of a brand mark on it. If you could get a collection of these brand marks used for the end of logs, you would have a very interesting bit of Americana. The reason that the logs are branded on the end is that they are dumped into the mill pond when they arrive at the mill. They are stored in a pond. At one mill there may be the logs of a number of corporations. They can identify the logs when they are in the mill pond by the stamping on the end. They boom them off and sort them at the sorting booms.

Some of the old branding irons will illustrate the brands. Northern had one brand, Cloquet had another. In our camp, as I recall it, we had several different kinds of brands because we were cutting timber belonging to several different corporations. I think all theProject corporations were controlled by Weyerhaeuser, but for some reason or other, the logs had to be identified. Branding is always on the log. The branding iron is a steel mallet. They just hit the end of the log with this steel mallet. It has on the end of it, of course, the “N” or the “C” or whatever the letter is, and it brands rather deeply into the log. They do it when the logs areSociety on the landing, just before they are loaded on the railroad cars. History The scaler had a complex scaling rule. He measures every log. He must be very skillful and observant in that there will be logs on the landing that might be hollow all the way or part of the, or they might be rotten, might have checksOral in them-- that is, cracks--and he can determine pretty well by eye, just what effect that crack, or that little hollow rotten piece, will have on the amount of lumber they will get out of the log. Historical The scaler is also one of the dignitaries of the camp, in that he sleeps in the office and has status of his own. He is sort of an auditor. We have to take this count on the contract on the thousands of board feet that are cut.History He is hired by the lumber company, not by the logging company. Campbell & Sheils were contractors. The partnership is this contracting company was between John C. Campbell, Jr., and Mortimer Sheils.

I’m sure you will be interested in how the trees are felled. In this particular camp, we contracted the felling of the trees. These were “gyppy” men also. As a matter of fact, often times the gyppo men stayedForest around afterMinnesota the roads were built and contracted to fell trees. We paid them so much a log. The contracting prices at that time would run from two a log. The contracting prices at that time would run from two to six cents a log--the biggest log was six cents. That meant that they had to saw the tree down and saw it into log lengths they did not have to cut the branches off; our swampers did that. They did not have to swamp out the skid ways and the skidding paths. But for six cents a log on the very biggest trees, it was heartbreaking for the gyppos trying to earn a good days income.

A long saw was about eight feet long, with handles at both ends. The axes were all double-bitted.

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The only single-bitted axes that you ever saw in the woods were the small cruiser axes. The foreman usually carried one of those and I carried one whenever I was in the woods. It was a piece of my equipment; why, I don’t know. I always carried a small cruiser ax with me. But the double-bitted axe was always used in notching a tree for felling. First a notch was cut in the direction that they wanted the tree to fall. Good contractors would fell the trees so that the logs were handy to take out. Careless contractors had no consideration whatever for the skidding teamsters. They didn’t give a hoot, and they would fell them one on top of another.

In felling a tree, the notch was cut below where you were going to make your felling cut. One trouble we had with contractors all the time was that they left too high stumps. We were after them time and time again. Another difficulty we had with the felling contractors was in giving us the proper distribution of log lengths. We wanted logs twelve feet, fourteen feet, sixteen feet, eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, and twenty-four feet long. Well, naturally, it would be their inclination to give you a lot of twelve foot logs, so we put a penalty on them in order to get the longer logs. I remember old man Campbell, the woods superintendent of the Cloquet and Northern Lumber Company, came in, and he was furious when we startedProject cutting because we were getting so many short logs. But we changed that.

You can tell an old-timer in the woods very quickly when he starts felling trees. A god man will know just where to put his notch. (The notch is cut with the ax.) You Societycan also tell when they work on the end of the saw. History The sawyers all work in teams of two men. Oftentimes, they work just one day and then they are separated, one man accusing the other one of “riding” his end of their saw. The long saw is a very flexible piece of steel, and they’ve gotOral to work in perfect coordination and unison for utmost effectiveness. They saw both ways, pushing and pulling, and it’s just amazing how fast they can fell a tree if they work right. Historical They must have their saw sharp. The camp filer keeps their saws filed, and sharp. Lumberjacks must keep the axe allotted to him sharp, by cooperative use of the grindstone in the sleeping camp. History

In felling the tree, they first make the wedge cut or the notch cut and then they saw through, but, in order to keep the saw from pinching, they tap in wedges back of the saw. Each pair of sawyers have two steel wedges. They are fastened together with a leather thong so they won’t be lost in the snow. The wedges are pounded in back of the saw as soon as the saw gets buried into the tree. TheyForest employ a heavyMinnesota mallet to pound the wedges in. So, there is the mallet, two wedges, a pair of axes, a saw, and a bottle of kerosene to carry from tree to tree. That bottle of kerosene is very important, because the saw has a tendency to get gummed up from the sap of the tree, and the only thing that will clean the saw off is the kerosene.

What happens when the tree goes down is this: there is always a chip from the edge of the cut down to the notch, and that chip is cut off. They make the saw cut so that the saw is just above the notch. Then when the tree falls down, there is that little extra piece out down by the notch and that is sawed off as soon as they get the tree out. I’ve seen ignorant neophyte tree fellers

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cutting timber around cultured areas where they put the notch above the saw cut. By so doing, there occurs a wedge-shaped piece cut off of the log. In motion pictures one sometimes sees stumps made out of papier-mâché with a great big splinter standing up in a way; you never see if the tree had been felled by real lumberjacks.

Lopping off the branches is quite a job, although not quite as much of a job as felling the tree.

Cutting the log in lengths was quite a job--not as difficult, however, as felling the tree, because in felling the tree you’ve got to be uncomfortably bent way over. The difficulty in cutting the log in lengths is that you must be sure that the cut is not being made in such a way that it will pinch the saw. The lumberjack is pretty clever about that; of course the tree is lying down on the ground. Sometimes, they have to use wedges in this operation, too, but not very often. They first measure by eye the logs that they are going to get out of that tree. Usually out of a fair sized white pine tree, they get five or six logs. The Norway’s are much taller, and they may get as many as nine.

There are just a few branches at the top of the tree on a Norway pine. SometimesProject you run into white pine that forks. Where you have a forked tree you cut just above the notch. In the woods they usually call a log of that kind a school ma’am log. You can use your imagination. A school ma’am log makes for a steady, non-spinning log floating on the river. A “security” log for a timid river driver… Society

I’d like to say something about tie cutting… History

There is one point in felling a tree… The sawyers cut their first log from the top. They take the top. Then they work upwards and cut the treeOral in the right lengths…

You can identify the barn boss easily just by walking through the camp, because he smells of barn. He spends most of his time in the barn. OfHistorical course, he has to keep the barn clean; he has to see that the horses are fed. They are fed oats and they are fed hay. The teamster, however, is supposed to see that his horses are watered. They are a primitive, but interesting… History I don’t know exactly. There might be as many as eighty horses, because, you see, a good many of the men probably would do that thing.

The foreman, of course, is the major-domo of the camp. Usually he is a man with years of experience, a man who has demonstrated what he is able to do. He assigns out all the work, and does the planning.Forest He Minnesotausually has, in the camp the size of ours, seventy-five to one hundred men. He would have a couple of straw bosses, and the straw bosses would watch the operations in certain parts of the woods. They bossed and gave instructions. They did very little physical labor. They were demonstrators. If some lumberjack seemed to not know a stump, the straw boss would jump in and show them how to handle an ax properly, or a peavey, or a camp. All of these people were lumberjacks themselves, all of the straw bosses and foremen. They were usually rather taciturn men, men of extremely serious mien, brilliant in that they were marvelous administrators. By administrators, I mean that they were human relations administrators and they were planners. They were wonderful supervisory men. They knew how to coordinate activities at

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their utmost efficiency. I haven’t seen more efficient men in my many years of business and letters as you would find in the foreman of the woods. I suppose there were some inefficient foreman too, but I doubt very much that they would last long because they kept very careful track of the day by day production of logs. They were always checking on us: “How many tiers did you get out today?”

Incidentally, each railroad car would load two tiers of logs; in other words, one pile on either end. You never talked in terms of how many cars you loaded; it was “How many tiers did you load?” The head of the woods operations, J. C. Campbell, would come in and he would check on the number of tiers. Then they also got a record of it because we had to sign in bills of lading to the offices in Cloquet. That was my job. I had to make out a bill of lading for every carload of logs. They had a careful check on us.

Also, the word was spread around among the lumberjacks throughout the whole woods area about the kind of foreman Chris Lee was, what kind of a foreman Glassow was, what kind of a foreman so-and-so and so-and-so was. So the opinion of the lumberjacksProject was a very strong factor in the success of a foreman. They would work much harder for some foreman than they worked for others. They’re not slow in expressing their opinion of straw bosses and foreman. They would say, “Oh, so- and-so, yeah. He’s looking down the neck of your shirt all the time.” Or, “so-and-so? He’s a good fellow. My gosh, he’s good for a five or a tenSociety every once in a while.”

(Break In Recording) History

The foreman is picked, and he’ll go down to Duluth and he’ll put in his orders--a cook, a certain number of cookees, a filer, a blacksmith, aOral barn boss. The price is usually fixed by the company itself, not by the…

It doesn’t take long to gather a crew together inHistorical Duluth, and they will send the men up. Usually, the foreman likes to pick his cook personally, because the cook is so important in maintaining a crew. A crew will stay with a good cook or a camp that feeds well. So all the available cooks are fairly well-known in the woods.History Unless they’ve got some sort of reputation for feeding well, the foreman doesn’t like to hire them.

They also like to pick a good blacksmith. If they can, they will also pick their own barn boss and their other straw bosses. The other people are sent up by the employment agency in Duluth. The time that I was there, they were sending them up in big and we used to have to pay ForestMinnesota The woods, of course, are full of pests. For the lumberjack there were these pests: the bedbug, flies, porcupines, mosquitoes and bears, and weasels every now and then. First of all, the bedbugs. After a camp has several years of use, it’s bound to be full of bedbugs. I never did learn of any effective way to get rid of them; you just learned how to live with them, that’s all. It seems that some men could sleep without ever having a bedbug bother them. Other men just seemed to be allergic to them.

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Mosquitoes were the worst pests. If I were ever to take a vacation in the woods, I most certainly would take it in the wintertime when there weren’t any mosquitoes around, because they can be perfectly miserable. In the woods, because of the heavy shades, the mosquitoes are wicked day as well as might and are miserable. The jacks did very little about them; they just learned how to live with the mosquitoes, too.

And the flies! If anyone is the slightest bit skittish about having flies around their food, they’d better not go around a lumber camp because the flies just swarm over every plate. You’ve just got to keep one hand going over your plate all the time to keep the flies off your food, and of course, you don’t want to eat any flies. They just swarm around. We did see the steam meat houses but the steam meat houses are not much of a deterrent to the bears. They’d smash through a steam meat house so fast

There were porcupines, of course, because one thing that a porcupine seems to be ravenous for is anything that is soft. They’ll eat the handle on an ax on the edge of the place where you sit. It’s kind of a slippery, uncomfortable place to sit after that. You’re not supposedProject to kill porcupines; it’s against the law. The reason that you’re not supposed to kill them is that for a person lost in the woods here is one source of meat you get that’s just a, because they’re very clumsy in the woods, they can easily be caught, and the meat I understand, is very tasty--I’ve never eaten any. Of course, there have been some big porcupines up there. Their quillsSociety are vicious weapons. They can slap their tail and bury their quills into a soft pine board with a back a quarter of an inch-- that’s harder than any nail. History

Once on a log drive I happened to be passing by a farmhouse, and the farm wife was out on the porch with a broom shooing some animal away,Oral and the dog was barking furiously. I saw it was a porcupine, and I went up to give her some help, and found the dog’s mouth and muzzle all full of quills. Fortunately, she had a pair of pliers, and we held the dog and pulled all the quills out, because these quills have a tendency to work theirHistorical way into the flesh and can actually cause the death of animals that attack a porcupine.

There are a lot of wolves Historyup in the woods, and there are a lot of coyotes, but I have never heard of a wolf or a coyote ever harming a person. They will, I’m told--and I think one followed me-- follow at night. They will only track a person, I’m sure, if that person is disabled in some way. But some jacks stayed late in the woods and in walking quite a ways at night in the woods, they would cut down a little spruce or balsam tree and drag that behind them, because it is around so that they will always be protected from the rear, dragging something behind them, and there was no danger.Forest Minnesota

There are wildcats in the woods--I guess you call them lynxes. You hear them scream out. On cold winter nights, you hear this type of coyote howling, and it sounds just like a lion. It’s a weird terrifying sound when a pack of wolves or coyotes starts howling at night. They’re usually howling when the moon’s out. They sound much closer than they really are. I set a trap, but I never caught one. I did catch musk rats, mink and beaver up in the woods.

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Full of water on to the locomotive. So I actually sat just on the steps of the cars, dropped my line in there, and pulled six pike as fast as I could pull them up. Six is all there were in that hole. I went up and down that stream and got myself all mosquito-bit, but got very few more.

They were nice fish.

There were plenty of fish in the lakes- - there were pickerel. On the drive--and here’s another thing that probably might put me down as a poor sportsman--we were short of meat one day in camp, and I went to the fish ladder. It was in the spring, when the fish were going upstream, and I pulled out about fifteen or twenty nice big pickerel out of that fish ladder just with my hands-- this was on the White Face River. Also, when they let water out of the big dam on the White Face, way above Two Harbors, then when they would close the dam down, the water would recede and we often caught pickerel that were...

January 18, 1955 Interview at Butler Library, Columbia University,Project New York City with Louis M. Starr.

First of all, my name is Carl Henrikson, Jr. I had nothing to do with the selection of the name. It happened to have been one that had been passed to the oldest son for Societyseven generations. I kept up the custom by imposing the same name on my own son. History My dad was a Swedish immigrant who came over in 1896, coming from Sweden in the province of Varmland. My mother was the daughter of Swedish homesteaders, nee Fredell, and lived in Minnesota all her life. Oral

My dad used to tell very interesting stories about the hardships of the earlier immigrants in making the sea journey and the cross-country journeyHistorical to Minnesota. Even as late as 1896, the Swedish immigrants had hardships. The earlier immigrants, of course, had greater hardships. Accommodations on the ships were extremely primitive. The immigrants, in many cases, had to bring and use their own food,History their own blankets on shipboard. When they reached New York, in many instances, they found themselves in the hands of unscrupulous agents who arranged for their transportation to Minnesota. Even their sleeping car accommodations in those days were nothing like they are now. There were crude bunks built in the railroad cars, and the immigrants had to supply their own bedding. The cars were poorly heated and extremely crowded, and the newcomers were glad when they reached the promised land of Minnesota. ForestMinnesota The Swedish immigration to Minnesota started in about 1850. Several Swedes found their way up to the area just north of Minneapolis, via the Saint Croix River, an area now called Chisago County, and they wrote back to Sweden about the rich lands that were there merely for the taking, and of the beautiful lakes and forested areas.

When my dad got there in 1896, it was all taken, and his hopes for getting some of this rich farm land didn’t materialize. But he had been an apprentice painter, and had learned the trade very well in Sweden, so he went into the painting business with my uncle, who had come over two

35

years earlier. For many, many years, they were partners in painting and other businesses.

My mother told stories about the hardships of the early homesteader settlers--the cold winters, the primitive living conditions, and the hard work breaking the land and putting it into cultivation. My granddad on my mother’s side was a wagon maker and made sleighs also. I remember in my childhood many of these wagons--they were very well, built. The sleighs were still in existence. They were often pointed out to me. They were called “Fridell wagons” or “Fridell sleighs”. He made them while he conducted his farming activities. He used to bring the work into his kitchen when it got real cold; otherwise he worked his shop out by the barn.

These early Minnesota settlers were marvelous people. All of them weren’t farmers; many were tradesmen, but, in my opinion and as I remember them, I thought and still think that they were really great men. They overcame the obstacles of the country, and of the language. In that area where I lived, a town called Lindstrom, about ninety-eight percent of the inhabitants were Swedes or of Swedish descent. Swedish was used a great deal more in business or on the street than English. I recall my young brother, Paul. When he went to schoolProject with me, about three years after I had started, I had to translate for him. I don’t know how it happened that I learned English, but I did. But Paul was the only one who stuck with the Swedish. My other brother, Earl, never did learn how to speak Swedish; he then couldn’t even understand it. I can’t account for the difference--I can’t recall; it’s just too long ago. Earl was four yearsSociety younger; Paul was two year younger, my sister Marie, six years younger. The children came two years apart in my family. It’s customary up in that country, and most familiesHistory had at least six or seven children. I don’t know whether the Swedes were looking on children as security in old age, but it certainly proved out that way with a good many Swedish people. The parents in later years were very well cared for by successful children. Who had Oralgone through very hard times and knew how to work hard.

Times were awfully hard in my early childhoodHistorical days. I can remember that I used a good deal of clothing from wealthier neighbors who pitied us. When I got clothes that were actually clothes bought in the stores, I felt quite proud. History I can remember the depression of 1907. There was very little business for my dad and my uncle, and they decided that the only way they keep the family eating was to go out to the harvest fields in the Dakotas. They bummed rides out to the Dakotas, but there were hundreds of thousands of others who had gone out for the same reason, so they found very little work, started back home broke and had to walk. My dad tells about how they used to wash their blistered feet in the creeks underForest the bridges,Minnesota how they tried to get on the freights to burn their way back, but the freights were crowded with bums, and they were chased off at every station.

These hardships also were felt in the food we got. Even a few years later, I recall that we got our meat from rabbits that we could shoot. I learned how to shoot very early in life so that I could help supply meat--rabbits, squirrels. In the summer and in the winter we fished; in the winter we fished through the ice. So our food came pretty much from the country.

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At a very young age, I had to go to work for my dad summers, helping him hang wallpaper. I used to do the pasting and he used to do the hanging. I think I was about twelve years old when I started to work for him. Also, I used to take care of the horses of the banker, Mr. Tuthill, across the street after school hours. In the summertime, in the evenings and in the mornings, before I would go to work for my dad, I would go out and catch frogs as bait for the fishermen. In the fall I would usually get started in school a month late because September was potato picking time. We would go out and help the farmers pick potatoes. I remember, too, that we were very well paid--a dollar a day, and of course, we got our meals free. Most of the farmers let us younger folks sleep, very proudly, of course, in beds. The older boys had to sleep out in the barn.

When I was thirteen years old, I got a job as night telephone operator in my home town. I went to work at nine o’clock, and usually the last call at night was at eleven. There was a bedroom next to the office, the place where the board was, and I could sleep all night. My first call in the morning was the call for the horse doctor, the veterinarian, and Dr. Sonwell. I can still remember his number--it was number 30. The calls always came in within five minutes of six o’clock in the morning, because the farmers would go out into the barn, find one of theProject horses or cows down, and they were probably almost as concerned about the horses and cows as they were about members of their family, so the horse doctor got the first call in the morning, and usually he got several calls. Society For that work, I got a salary of seven dollars a month. I held that job for three years. I had an awful lot of fun, too, because I was the only boy, and Historyhad a pretty good deep voice, within miles, and I used to enjoy talking until one or two o’clock in the morning with the women telephone operators up and down the line. Later on, when I reached the mature age of fifteen and sixteen, I made trips to call them, and quite some courtshipsOral existed.

I knew about whatever went on in town from listening in on the telephone. I knew about the love life of a lot of married people, and I think probably,Historical I knew more about that community than anybody there. But I kept it strictly confidential.

We had party lines, of course.History As I recall it, at that time we had about ninety subscribers. The party lines were very interesting because everybody listened in. We used to ring with a hand grinder; they didn’t have power in those days--only batteries. The equipment was pretty primitive. On some nights when we had heavy thunderstorms, all hell broke loose up in the office because we had our fuse board right in the office and there was terrific crackling and flames flying in all directions. ForestMinnesota One other thing. That telephone office was quite a hangout. All my friends came up there and would sit with me from nine until ten thirty. The stories we told and the plan- fling that went on there was simply terrific.

I got fired from that job. I was in high school at the time, and freshman class and sophomore class, and the junior and senior class, too, had a flag contest. We were attempting to get our flags on top of the high school, and the one who could keep it there until noon of a certain day won the cont est. Well, one rainy night, the seniors got their flag up-I was a junior at the time--and I

37

happened to look out the window and see the big flag up there, so I called one of my friends. We got a ladder, and I abandoned the switchboard, and we went down there and yanked down the senior flag. I got back and who was there in the office, but the branch manager of the company. He hadn’t been in town for months, but he happened to come in that morning and I got the gate. It was something I shouldn’t have done, of course, but it’s strange how those class loyalties can influence one.

There was other work, though. In the wintertime we trapped muskrat, and mink, when we could get them. That meant getting up at four thirty and five o’clock in the morning, running the trap line and skinning out the rats and putting them on boards before going to school. It was bitterly cold. It got down sometimes to twenty-five and thirty below zero. It was fairly profitable. The average price of muskrat skins at that time was about from fifteen to twenty-five Cents a skin. You might get three and four dollars for a mink. For weasels you would get all the way from fifty cents to a dollar.

I remember one year we went down with our skins to St. Paul. St. PaulProject was quite a fur trading center in that time--there was a good deal of trapping that went on in Minnesota. The market had gone completely to pot. My dad happened to go down with me to help me sell my skins--I was only about twelve or thirteen years old at the time- -and we decided to have them tanned and hold them over for another year. Then, incidentally, they Cut fur mittens,Society caps and muffs for my mother and sister. The following year the skin market went up a good deal and we made out all right. History

A friend of mine across the Street by the name of Clarence Tuthill, who incidentally happens to work in New York now--I happened to meetOral him quite by accident--the banker’s son, got interested in a thing called wireless and started to experiment around. He bought a wireless set, a transmitter and a receiver. I had another friend, Victor, who is in the insurance business up in Minnesota at the present, who also bought a wirelessHistorical set. Well, I couldn’t afford to buy one. I think they cost something like $18.75, and that was a lot of money. But I looked them over, read some very early literature on the wireless, and decided that I would build one. I was making a little bit of money by sellingHistory soda pop and candy at the ball games on Sunday. I would make a profit on the average of $1.20 a Sunday. So I got a receiver and various parts and put together the transmitter, with the use of spark coil from my dad’s launch. Every time he wanted to use the launch, he had to go up and dismantle my wireless set to put his spark coil back in the launch.

Those were pioneering times in radio- -this was back in 1912, when so-called tubes in radio had just been Forestinvented by LeeMinnesota DeForest. We were very anxious to get a hold of one of these tubes. Clarence Tuthill, as I recall it, did get a hold of one, but I never did. We made our transmitter out of a spark coil. We used batteries at first, and a spark cap. We made a condenser out of plates of glass and zinc. Our spark cap we made Out of battery binding post and pieces of brass and zinc. My key for the transmitter, which incidentally was made up of my dad’s spark coil, was a scrap of brass and knob was a top off an ink bottle. I put a battery binding post innot that with sealing wax and it worked quite well.

38

Later on, however, I had trouble with it, because we had been reading a little literature and we had been reading physics books, and we thought that we might apply something that we had read in a physics book. The principle that an electric current going through an electrolytic solution, say, of sulfuric acid, would interrupt the current a tremendous number of times. As I recall it, it was at a frequency of some thousands of times a second. We decided that we would attempt to build one of these, and we did. We used a fruit jar and in that we had our electrolytic solution, four parts water to one part sulfuric acid. For one of the poles we put a heavy piece of copper wire into a medicine bottle. We drilled a hole in the bottom of the medicine, because we had a very narrow aperture coming out of it, and the other pole was a piece of lead. We decided we would hook it onto the electric lights, screw the vibrator and spark coil down, and see what we got.

Well, we really got something. With a one inch spark cap we got a three inch hot flame, of very high frequency. The only trouble was when we drew that current off the electric lines--and incidentally the electric lines had just come into town--we flickered every light in town. There were five of us at that time with radio sets, and we all built electrolyticProject interrupters and used our spark coils. That was Clarence Tuthill, Lindstrom--the town was named after his granddad, Victor, whose father was a great merchant up in Lindstrom, and Francis Momberg, son of the jewelers. We were all Swedish boys, except Tuthill; Tuthill was not a Swede. Society Just as soon as we saw the light flickering, we all dashed for sets, because we knew that somebody was on and we could go up and listen. ThatHistory didn’t last too long because people complained. They wanted to know why the lights were flickering. Mr. Layton, as I recall it, was the lineman on that branch of the power company extending Out from St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. He looked into it. He was quiteOral a detective, and he found out what was happening. He placed it, and he said, “Well, boys, it’s perfectly all right, but you’re going to have a condenser on the pole outside the house. Otherwise we can’t let you carry on.” Well, we couldn’t afford a condenser, $200, so we just had to giveHistorical up our wonderful electrolytic interrupter. At that time we formed a club and called it the Lindstrom Radio Club, because we were all convinced at that time that “wireless” would be a very temporary name for this electronic miracle of communication by air. BelieveHistory it or not, here we were fourteen and fifteen years old, and we named the club the Lindstrom Radio Club. We learned code, but not very well, but it was rather handy with Clarence, because I could open up my window and yell over to him and ask him whether he got me, what did I say, and so on, so we could check by direct communication.

Then in 1915, some people came down from Duluth, Minnesota, to organize a unit of the MinnesotaForest Naval Militia.Minnesota They wanted a unit of at least forty to fifty men. There weren’t that many eligible people around, so they let a lot of us young fellows in. Our parents were perfectly willing to sign the application saying that we were eighteen years old, even though we were only fifteen and sixteen. All sorts of promises were made. Yes, we would get airplanes that we could fly. Those of us in radio saw opportunities to become radio operators.

We used to drill once a week in the opera house of the home town, and then in the summertime we made weekend cruises on the U.S.S. Gopher, named after the animal symbol of Minnesota, the Gopher State. We would go up to Duluth on a Friday and come back Monday morning on

39

these training cruises, and Clarence Tuthill, I and Chick Lindstrorn were radio operators.

But I got very sick of it. I didn’t know the code well enough to take it down. They were just using the Morse Code.

There were no tubes in the set. It was just a regular transmitter with a great big rotary gap. The little radio shack was exceedingly cramped, and when you opened up with that transmitter, the ozone smell became almost overpowering in that little airtight shack.

I can recall hearing the first music on radio. It was startling. It seems that an experimenter, an amateur on the hill up in Duluth, was fooling around attempting to transmit music, and he did, but the tone range was very narrow. But imagine my nodding off and suddenly hearing this music in my receivers! It was astounding.

Each summer, also, they had cruises out on the Atlantic. In 1916, I went on a summer cruise on the U.S.S. Rhode Island, but had the misfortune of being put in the sickProject bay with pneumo nia off Block Island. Here we were, kids sixteen years old, sailors, and I think pretty good ones. The young Swedish people up there certainly had learned how to work hard and were extremely conscientious and very susceptible to discipline, because Swedish homes are highly disciplined. I can remember in my home whenever we had visitors, the children linedSociety up in a row. We had been taught how to bow and curtsey perfectly, and we had been taught never to speak unless spoken to. We had to disappear upstairs to our wood stove-heatedHistory rooms very early in the evening.

I’m sure the naval officers were aware thatOral we were under eighteen. They winked at it in those days. The younger you can get them, the better you can train them. They probably do a little winking still today, if they can get the parents to sign. Historical This was the Minnesota Naval Militia, of course tied up in some way with the United States Navy--I never knew exactly how. History In 1916, I read the Congressman Schall, the famous blind Congressman, later Senator from Minnesota and later ambassador to England, was going to give competitive examinations for appointments to Annapolis. I had made up my mind that I wanted a naval career, so even though I was sixteen and, as I recall it, had barely started in a course in geometry, I decided to prepare myself for those examinations and try to get the principal appointment. I got down there and I was heartbroken,Forest becauseMinnesota here were twenty- one people competing for this principal appointment. Many of them were high school graduated and college students.

I took the examination with the rest of them, both a physical and an educational examination, and lo and behold, one day I got a telegram saying I had won the principal appointment at Annapolis. I still don’t understand what happened. I have a hunch that probably the good Congressman used other factors than merely the examinations in deciding on his appointment. Probably he thought it would be a good thing to have the upper part of his district represented.

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So then I had to prepare for the entrance examinations to Annapolis. I went to a preparatory school, at that time called the Northwest Preparatory Academy, to prep for the exams. I worked very hard, took the examination, and at the beginning of the algebra exam I got a terrible nosebleed, and couldn’t finish the exam the way I wanted to. I flunked the algebra and of course flunked out of entrance, only because of that one subject, algebra. So the good Congressman was kind enough the following year to give me another app ointment without examination. However, that was in 1917 and the Naval Militia unit was thrown into the United States naval reserve force, and we were called into active service on March 20, 1917, so I did not take the examination. I never got to Annapolis, but I don’t particularly regret it.

I might say something about the early sports of the day in a little Swedish community. I remember too that most of the conversation in homes, on the street, in business places was Swedish. I learned how to understand Swedish, but none of us younger people ever tried to speak it. One brother did, but he got away from it, I think it was a little bit too bad that we didn’t. In later life I did learn how to speak Swedish in school at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of a professor with a German background. Project

My parents wanted us to speak good English. They didn’t encourage us to carry on with Swedish at all. All of the Swedes were most devout Americans. The thing that is a constant wonder to me is the fact that this thing that sociologists speak about so often--the conflictSociety between the immigrant parents and the offspring coming up under a new culture, and all the difficulties that those conflicts brought about--just didn’t exist in the SwedishHistory community.

The farm children did more Swedish conversation than the children in the small towns. The population of this small town where I livedOral at that time was about four hundred and fifty people. There was a town about two miles away, called Center City, which had a population of about two hundred. A town about three miles to the other side called Chisago City had a population of about three hundred. This town got its name fromHistorical the Indian name for the lakes in that area. As a matter of fact, as I recall it, the Indian name was Kichisago. At one time it was great Indian country. Strangely enough, however, I never did find any Indian artifacts as much as I hunted around the country. I neverHistory looked for them. Probably I walked over them a good many times.

Getting back to sports, we played baseball. We had a kid baseball team, and we traveled to nearby towns. We had a band; I played cornet in the band, and most of the young fellows played in the band. We hunted. All the young boys hunted. We had old shotguns. My granddad let me have his old shotgun and almost burst into tears when he found a rust spot on it at one time, and then told Forestme I could useMinnesota his older gun, which was a muzzle loader. I didn’t like the muzzle loader, so finally my dad let me use his gun, which was a very good one, incidentally. I had an old rifle which didn’t function any too well, a .22 rifle.

I had to be a meat shooter. In other words when I went out to shoot it was to keep the family in food. My dad used to count the shells or the bullets before I would go out, and I had to account for every shot that was missing with game, rabbits, or in the fall I shot muskrats, or squirrels, or ducks. When you have that kind of pressure on you, you have to learn how to shoot.

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There were no hunting licenses in those days, no trapping licenses. I don’t know when hunting licenses came into use in Minnesota, but certainly not before the First World War, as I recall it. There were deer hunting licenses, however, but not for small game. There weren’t any deer around that country at that time; there are now. They’ve come down from the north, which is strange.

We did a good deal of fishing and motor boating. There were more motorboats on the lake in those days than there are now. Of course now there are a good many outboard motor boats. In 1917, war was declared, about three weeks after we were mustered into the navy. Our unit was sent to Philadelphia and we were put on board the U.S.S. Massachusetts, which was obsolete then. There were two other ships in the navy yard; they called them part of the White Fleet, the famous White Fleet that went around the world. There was the U.S.S. Iowa and the U.S.S. Oregon. They had been in mothballs for years. Ships in mothballs in those days were really in mothballs tar on the deck an inch thick, and they had to chip all the paint off, repaint them and put them back into shape. Project Then we were taken off those ships--they acted as sort of receiving stations--and assigned to various ships. At that time I remember the first convoy that went across the Atlantic, and one of my friends went across on it. Did we have a good time listening to his stories about that trip! There was submarine battle. I doubt that there ever was a submarine battle,Society but he told an interesting story anyhow. History Then the time came when volunteers were asked for extra hazardous duty. Well, of course, everybody volunteered for extra hazardous duty and I did too. The only thing was, when they selected the few people for this extra hazardousOral duty, I was the fortunate or the unfortunate one to be selected. It was for minesweepers. They had converted some railroad tugs--as I recall it, the Lehigh Railroad tugs--and they were to be used as minesweepers over on the other side. I happened to get the U.S.S. Genessee. There wasHistorical also the U.S.S. Lykeris, the Cherokee--you see the minesweeper-tugboats were al named after Indian tribes.

Later on, new minesweepersHistory were built and they were named after birds. They were palaces compared to these old railroad tugs.

I should say that before we left Minnesota for Philadelphia some high officers came from Washington to my home town to inspect the Naval Militia unit and examined people who wanted petty officer ratings. Instead of going for radio, I wanted to be up on the bridge where the real excitementForest was, so I hadMinnesota studied for a rating in quartermaster second class! At that time I think I was seventeen years old.

I was quartermaster second class on this U.S.S. Genessee. When I went over to here in Philadelphia she was a pile of junk. The crew was composed of young fellows who had been shipped in from the Midwest and various parts of the East Coast. None of them had ever been to sea before. I felt like an old sea dog compared to them, because I had had cruises and had been on the Atlantic the summer before, I had to take on considerable responsibility.

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We had an old Swedish skipper by the name of Teasel. Believe it or not, he couldn’t read English. He was an old merchantman that they had commissioned as a lieutenant.

We put out to sea. Our first assignment was to tow submarines from the lower Delaware up to the submarine base at New London. We didn’t know what work we were going to be assigned to, and I remember that night when they got down there I was in my bunk. We had two signalmen, and I was in charge of the bridge gang--myself and two signalmen. The submarines would blink their lights, and these two boys couldn’t read the signals. I got up on the bridge, but I didn’t know whether I could, either, but I did manage to read them, and we picked up two submarines and towed them up to New London. Fortunately the weather was very calm.

When we got up there, we had several practice sessions with the other tugs towing submarines. We still didn’t know what we were going to do. Then one day we got orders to get the submarines in tow, provision the ship- - it was a coal burning tug and we had coal piled all over the ship--and we put out to sea. We wouldn’t know our destination until that evening. Destination: Ponta Delgada, Azores. A calm night, it was such a night Projectout, and the tugs --there were three of us--had six submarines in tow and riding three. We were to change off towing them. The reason we were towing them was that they couldn’t get across the Atlantic under their own oil capacity. Society The second night was a calm night, and the submarine bearers had their phonographs out on the deck, and we could hear the music across the water. IHistory went to bed under those very calm conditions, and woke up toward morning. We were pitching violently, terrifically; we were coming into a hurricane. Oral I put my clothes on and went up to the bridge. I never realized that a ship could toss around from side to side so extremely and still stay afloat. The water was coming down the hatches and the dishes we had--and they were all crockery--wereHistorical tumbling all over. We had lost our submarines; the tow lines had broken. The wind was screaming through the rigging. It roared. The rain was pouring down. We were in a hurricane. History For about forty-eight hours all our efforts were to stay afloat. We had lost not only the submarines completely, but the other tugs. I understand the Lykens turned back and had to be run aground. She went down in the same storm the Cherokee Queen also went down. They lost about nineteen men. We were then just to the north and west of Bermuda, as I recall it, so we got orders by radio to pull into Bermuda. The other ships, the submarines and the tugs, didn’t get the orders. WeForest were the onlyMinnesota tug to get to Bermuda. We waited, and no submarines. Finally, the commander of the Bushnell, which was a mother ship for the submarines in Bermuda, sent us a very distressing signal to the effect that we must now consider these submarines as lost with many brave men--the usual message of that kind. But fortunately one by one they showed up. Some of them showed up in Bermuda. One showed up, as I recall it, down at North Carolina, another one up at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and one of them, the smallest of them all--only half as large as the “L” boats, the one got all the way to Ponta Delgada in the Azores on her own. How she ever did I don’t know but she did.

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We laid up in Bermuda for a while. We had no dishes. All of our bedding was soaked, all of our clothing was I had a sewing machine that was under water for days. I finally got that out and cleaned it up and remarkably it ran. On a tugboat you’ve got to double. I was the sail maker, the tailor, and quite a few other things.

After a few days of this terrific hurricane, we did get to Bermuda. We had no charts because we didn’t expect to go there. We didn’t know the regulations and amenities of entering the harbor and we irritated the local British naval officials a great deal by brazenly sailing in the glassy bay without any recognition signals, and with little regard for channels and buoys. But we got in there, after scraping a few reefs.

I had orders to take a report over to the admiral in charge of the naval forces in that area, a British admiral. The skipper told me to hand it to the admiral personally. Well, I had learned to obey to the letter, so I went to the admiral’s home, and a colored servant in a white coat came to the door. It was right at lunchtime or dinnertime--I forget which. I said, “I have some documents that I would like to give to the Admiral personally.” Project

The servant said, “I will take them.”

I said, “No, my orders are to give them to the admiral personally.” Society

The admiral was in the dining room and he overheardHistory me. He said, “Give those documents to the man and he’ll give them to me.”

I couldn’t see the admiral because he was aroundOral the corner, and I said, “I am sorry. My orders are to give these to the admiral personally.”

The admiral told me to get out and bring them backHistorical to the skipper, which I did. I don’t know what happened, but the skipper had the record or that.

We enjoyed Bermuda a greatHistory deal. All of these Midwestern sailors, most of whom had never seen the ocean before, were now old salts.

I’d like to go back, however, to a few things that happened in Philadelphia before I went on the tug. I was reminded of it when I mentioned the Midwestern sailors who had never seen the ocean. ForestMinnesota While waiting for my billet on the tug, I was at the camp called the receiving station. We had to go through a period of quarantine before being put on a ship for overseas. One Saturday afternoon orders came for a crew to go down and scrape the bottom of the U.S.S. Orion, which at that time was the biggest ship in the navy--it was a collier. Well, Saturday afternoon, those of us out of quarantine all went ashore. None of us wanted to stay in camp over the weekend. There were no petty officers around, and I was one of the seniors, seventeen years old, a second class quartermaster. So I got orders to take this crew of some four hundred men down to scrape the bottom of the U.S.S. Orion. The U.S.S. Orion was put into dry-dock, the water was pumped out,

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and I had this huge crew--the biggest command I’ve ever had in my life--and the biggest one I’ll ever have. I ran around that dry-dock with a great big megaphone and gave orders here and there, orders that I got from civilian workers, who told me what to do. But we got the bottom scraped in record time, and I got a very nice commendation for the job of scraping the bottom of the biggest ship in the navy at that time. None of these people scraping the bottom of the ship had ever seen a ship before. They all came from the Midwest. They were farmers from Iowa who had come through the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. So it was a terrific experience for them to be so closely connected with a big ship, even though it was the bottom.

A collier was bigger than a battleship. These colliers were tremendously large. We had one little accident. As the water was being let out of the dry-dock, one of the floats on which the sailors were working with the long handled scrapers happened to get caught on the propeller. They didn’t get it off, the water went down and down, and the boys climbed on the propeller and were stranded. Some of them, however, went into the water.

Of course, every sailor has a sweetheart in a port. They used to say a sailorProject has a sweetheart in every port; that isn’t quite true, because sailors don’t get to every port. In Philadelphia, I met a young lady, a Susan Cossard, up in Redwood Park, and there was the usual sad parting when I left Philadelphia and a stream of letters back and forth after I got to sea. Of course, I had another sweetheart at home, too with whom I correspond. Society

Returning to Bermuda, the submarines were put backHistory in shape, we were put back in shape and cleaned up and we started out for the Azores. We got to the Azores. It wasn’t entirely an uneventful trip. One man was lost off one of the submarines one night. Submarines, of course, don’t carry lifeboats and it was impossibleOral to find him. We looked around for a while, but it was pitch black, and we were traveling dark, and we just had to give him up.

We became hardened sailors. We still didn’t haveHistorical any dishes to eat off. During the storm we had no dishes, did no cooking, and fed ourselves on the stores down in the hold. We got down into the hold, would open cases of tomatoes and fruit, and the cook did manage to cook a boiler full of coffee once in a great while.History There was no place to sleep. We slept on the engine room gratings. The ship, at that time, was careening around. We did have a list indicator to show how far we rolled, and that showed a roll of forty-five degrees to one side and fifty-five to the other. Water poured in all over, even in the engine room. Of course, there was no washing. The salt water would dry on our faces and we would be salt-encrusted all over.

Sleeping Foreston the engineMinnesota room gratings was quite an athletic achievement, because you had to get your fingers and your toes in to keep yourself from rolling over on top of the cylinder heads on the engine. We slept on life preservers. We did that about three or four nights, any time we had a heavy sea, and we had several heavy seas all the way from Bermuda to the Azores, and then we slept on topsides.

The skipper, old man Teasel, had been to sea enough so that he had sense enough to be more frightened than the rest of us were. We had an executive officer who was a society man. As I recall it, he was both a lawyer and a doctor, but he liked his drink, and he was taken off the ship

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in Bermuda because he showed himself not fit to fulfill that kind of an assignment.

The average age of the crew on the tug, as I recall it, was about nineteen years of age. We were all young. We had forty-eight on the crew. We had three commissioned officers: the captain, who was a two-striper; an executive officer, a stripe-and-a-half; and then we had a warrant engineer in charge of the engine room.

The tugboat was, as I recall it, about one hundred and sixty feet long, had power of about one thousand horsepower-I forget what the tonnage was. It was very seaworthy, after it was fixed up to be seaworthy, after the ventilators were taken off the main deck and put up to the gun deck so that the seas wouldn’t wash down. But it was very wet sleeping. I remember trying to eat down below when the water was sloshing around down in the living quarters. There were benches along the edge of the bunks, and one heavy sea came along and those of us sitting with plates in our hand--tin-pie tins, incidentally, what we had scrounged around and found--slid clean across the deck and put our food right in the laps of the fellows sitting on the other side and had to stop it. Everything we had was wet--it was terrible. Project

Well, we pulled into the Azores--I forget in how many days. I do know that the total sailing time across the Atlantic was thirty-nine sailing days--that I do remember--because you don’t make very much speed towing a couple of submarines. Society

When we got to the Azores, all of us thought it was a Historyfabulous place. It was the tropics. Almost none of us, except the captain, had been in a tropical country, and we found the bumboats coming alongside selling pineapples six for a quarter, oranges at half a dollar for about half a bushel. Boy, this was the life. You could goOral ashore and get a meal for a thousand meals, which were sixty-six cents, and have everything you want--wines, liquors and anything you could ask for. That was the life. I remember as we pulled toward the Azores, I was mystified because I noticed this white area at the base of this mountainousHistorical island.

The island was about, as I recall it, seven or eight miles long and about two or three miles wide. This white area that lookedHistory like snow on the beach in the early half light of dawn actually was the city of Ponta Delgada, a beautiful place with all the houses painted in pastel tints. None of us had ever seen anything like that. Bermuda was astounding enough to us Midwestern sailors, but the Azores, that was something. We happened to get in there by Christmas Day in 1917. I went to church that Christmas night and found all the churches crowded, and I remarked how religious the people were. ForestMinnesota We were standing at the back of this large church in Ponta Delgada, and one of the Portuguese Azoreans happened to overhear me, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, “The churches are crowded on Christmas in your country, too? You will find that on Sundays they are just as empty here as they are in your country,” which brought me up with a considerable start.

We were in the Azores just about a week or two, getting prepared for a trip we knew not where, because we never knew ahead of time just where we were going. When we pulled out of the Azores, we headed northeast, and then we were told that we were to go to Queenstown, Ireland,

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still towing the submarines. Incidentally, the captain of one of the submarines was Admiral Nimitz. At that time, he was Lieutenant Nimitz--I remember the name quite well. Naturally, that comes back to me because of the fame that he has gained since. I didn’t know him personally.

We had on board the tug, a commander who was in charge of the submarine flotilla. He was a charming fellow, and had a tremendous respect for the navigating ability of our Swedish captain, Teasel.

I must tell one story about Teasel now, because actually this event happened at New London, and the story is still being told in naval circles all over the world. However, as time has passed, the story has changed a good deal; I have heard a number of versions of it.

This is the story: (and incidentally, I have heard this story through two admirals, but they’ve got it on a different tug and with a different skipper, but this is actually the story.) At New London it was bitterly cold. We were waiting to tow the submarines to the Azores. The dock where we were tied up was infested with rats. We had no rat shields on our mooringProject lines, and the rats were trying to climb up the lines to board the ship. We amused ours elves by having some of the boys hide back of the bulwarks of the tub, and a couple of us up on the bridge would tell the fellows when a rat was about halfway up the line. The boys would jump up and shake the lines, and down would fall the rats in the water. Society

The Swedish skipper came out of his cabin, which wasHistory just below the bridge, and was enjoying the fun too, when he spotted a huge gray rat about as big as a cat coming around the corner of the warehouse on the pier. He made the famous remark, “Look! Look, boys. Yesus, what a mice!” Oral Well, I’m sure that that story will be told for many years to come. Admiral Stone, who was in charge of the Mediterranean fleet, told the story so that I heard it one day at a luncheon table, and I made the mistake--yes, it was a mistake--to tellHistorical the Admiral the real story. One shouldn’t do those things.

I made the same mistake Historyseveral years later by telling Admiral “Bull” Halsey the real story after I had heard a version of it from him at a luncheon table. I don’t think that I will ever correct an admiral anymore, because I don’t think they are pleased to have themselves corrected.

Another instance, while I am on the Swedish skipper that indicated his background of education, was this: I was on the bridge one day, receiving a semaphore signal from a signalman off in the distance whoForest was transmittingMinnesota very slowly. So I was spelling out in disgust. So I slowly said, “Y- E-S.” I said, “Skipper, he said yes.”

Old man Teasel said, “What did you say?”

I said, “He said yes.”

He said, “But what did you spell?”

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“I spelled Y-E-S.”

He said, “Is that the way you spell ‘yes’?”

I said, “Yes, how do you spell it?”

He said, “Why, J-A-S, of course.”

In my luncheon with Admiral Bull Halsey- - I was one member of a luncheon group at the Union League Club--Bull Halsey, after personal discussion about the U.S.S. Genessee--and he knew it very well and told us some stories about the U.S.S. Genessee that I didn’t know, and particularly about our Swedish skipper--told the story of the difficulties and the hardships that we had in crossing the Atlantic. To hear him tell it, it was a much more harrowing story than I had ever imagined it was. Those stories, with time, have a way of getting more and more interesting.

Halsey was the captain of a destroyer, and part of the time, I think, he wasProject the with the admiral’s staff. Admiral Simms was our American commander-in-chief. Incidentally, on the trip from Bermuda to Queenstown, we were accompanied by the mother ship, the U.S.S. Bushnell, so we had the good solid company of a larger ship. Society We had a terrible time getting into Queenstown. About two hundred miles out we were met by a destroyer convoy. That was a sight I’ll never forget. IHistory had seen some camouflaged ships, but not with that new type of camouflage that the destroyers had at that time, the “patchwork quilt” type of camouflage. I never knew that a ship could roll and toss around as much as those destroyers could. We could watch the boys sliding onOral lines just like a strap that you would see in a streetcar or a subway car. They would grab the strap and slide down the cable down the deck at quite some speed. It was a very dangerous occupation. Historical But for real thrills, the sight of the crew of the submarine attaching a tow line from the submarine to our tug in a heavy sea was something that was really soul-stirring. In bitter winter, they would get out on theHistory forecastle of the submarine, heaving on this very heavy tow line, dipping under water, completely under water, hiding all of the men. Then they would come up, and as soon as they were above water, they would yank in that tow line and get it up on the submarine. My, how I pitied those poor fellows. Unfortunately, the shaping gear had not been invented to prevent tow lines from breaking off. We tried and tried to devise something to prevent cow lines parting, but we never did. So we often had that task of getting the submarines in tow againForest after a partedMinnesota line. In heavy weather it was dirty business on the deck of a submarine. Why they weren’t washed off the deck, I don’t know. They had one little thin wire to hang onto from the bow of the submarine up to the conning tower. As I recall it, it was just a very low wire, probably a foot above the deck around the edge of the deck, but that was all to keep them on board. And it was in midwinter, and bitterly cold.

I said we had a terrible time getting into Queenstown, and so we did. We got in there and it was pitch dark, and we approached the harbor entrance. We were told to follow one of the destroyers- -they would guide us in. The only thing we could see on the destroyer was a dim blue light, well-

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shielded, on the after mast of the destroyer. We got into the inner harbor at Queenstown, and then the destroyer took a right-hand turn. We couldn’t see anything. It was pitch dark, and it was a heavy night. So we lost our guide. We didn’t know where on earth to go, so we kept on going and plowed into the submarine nets. Well, then all hell broke loose. A light commenced to flash up on a hill, and a gun blasted. I woke up to the fact that probably that light up on the hill that was just flickering was a signal. I had never seen blinker lights used that fast before. So I gave an acknowledgement, asked them to go slowly, and sure enough it was a signal. We had plowed into the submarine nets, and a big searchlight went on. They saw that we weren’t a submarine. As I recall it, there was only a shot or two fired at us, neither of which hit us. Finally, we got an escort and got into Queenstown. I recall, too, that morning we waited and waited and waited for daylight, and no daylight. 7:30, 8:00, 9:00, and still dark. We commenced to realize that we were pretty far north. It finally got light some time after nine in the morning.

Well, the skipper had to go up and report. I didn’t learn about that famous report until this dinner with Bull Halsey. The skipper told about the hardships and they decided, after listening to him report, that he was some god. Project

Queenstown was another great new land to the Midwest sailors, but by this time we were really old tars. Here we were, with the British sloops and destroyers, and our own destroyers strung out in that beautiful harbor, with Queenstown on the hillside with its dominatingSociety cathedral spire, and the houses row on row in terraces on the hill. Queenstown was quite a place for the sailors on leave. By the time we got there, sailors were not permittedHistory to go up to Cork. They had had a terrible battle a few weeks before we got there in which several sailors were hurt, and that was off limits for the rest of the war. Oral In Queenstown there was the main street down along the waterfront, with the famous Anchor Bar. That was the first time I ever saw barmaids. They had barmaids in Queenstown, not that I patronized the bars a great deal--I was too young.Historical There was the Rob Roy Hotel and the Queens Hotel, and up on the hill, the famous Hog Wrassle. The Hog Wrassle was a public dance hail, a great big red sheet iron barn. But what a place for the sailors. One thing that disappointed me a great deal and made me pityHistory the Irish people was that so few of them, even the younger people, had teeth. It was a rare person who, by the time he was seventeen and eighteen years old, had a full set of teeth in his mouth. The better class women, I suppose, didn’t frequent the streets very much. There wasn’t very much for the sailors to do.

They did build a club in an old bathhouse down along the waterfront. Later on they built a YMCA hut.Forest Minnesota

The favorite meal in Queenstown was steak and eggs. All of us enjoyed going ashore to eat steak and eggs. Of course, the word was that the reason the Irish people’s teeth were so bad was that the water was bad. Consequently, the sailors thought they had better drink something different from water. Which they did--ale, porter, Black and White, and other famous drinks.

I would like to get in here the story of a little girlfriend of mine in Queenstown. I was very proud of her because she had all her teeth. Her name was Tessie O’Sullivan. She had a pal who was

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called Josie Fitzpatrick. Josie was a big husky gal; Tessie was more petite but was husky too. She should be, because Josie and Tessie worked in the dock- yards, and they were riveters. Josie was the riveter and Tessie was the holder-on. They prided themselves on the fact they would never go out with sailors. Everyone tried to make the grade, and one day I tried my luck. I merely went up and asked how I could get to the church. They said, “We don’t know and we don’t care.”

I said, “Well, goodness, I thought you could at least be civil.”

So they said, “Well, we’ll show you.”

And that’s how I got to know Tessie and big Josie. Big Josie used to be called by the British, the “Boot” because she had slugged so many British sailors who attempted to approach her on the street. Tessie later on, I think, was responsible for probably saving my life.

Before I left Minnesota I got interested in the Boy Scout movement. It Projectwas a very young movement at that time. I had run across what ostensibly was a Boy Scout troop up in the hills back of the town, and I made myself acquainted and told them that I was interested in scout work and knew something about it in America. Society I was taken in by the group, got acquainted with them, went out on a hike or two with them. Incidentally, from the top of the hill you could overlookHistory the harbor, and I pointed out the ship that I sailed on.

Some weeks later, some of the boys from theOral tug were up on the hill picking blackberries, and they ran across what looked like a hatch cover over some sort of a subterranean cave. Being curious, they lifted it up, and in there they saw a store of arms, guns. So immediately, they bleed off for the admiralty house to report their find. HistoricalThe admiralty sent several lorries and got three lorries full of arms. These arms were for the Irish revolutionists, called Sinn Feiners. These arms had been smuggled in by German ships, believe it or not, in the early part of the war, probably by German submarines. WhatHistory had happened when these boys discovered the arms is that they were observed by several of these boys who were Boy Scouts--in effect they were a junior training corp. of the revolutionist army. I didn’t know that; they were hiding under the guise of the Boy Scouts, I believe.

They had trailed the boys to the admiralty and down to the dock and watched and saw that they had gone Forestout to the tugboat.Minnesota So they connected this event with my activities with the Boy Scout troop--or the Sinn Fein youngsters.

I didn’t know about this until the next day. I went ashore and called at Tessie’s home, and had the door slammed in my face. Then I went down to a store, the back half of which was the living quarters of the family that owned it--they were friends of Tessie’s. The living quarters were separated from the front of the store by cloth curtains. So I asked for Tessie and if she had been around. Before that they had been very friendly, and they just told me no. Well, I heard a movement back of the curtains, pulled the curtains aside and there was Tessie. So she pulled me

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behind the curtains and said, “Get right back on the ship. They’re going to put a placard up on ye.” The custom of the Sinn Feiners at that time when they executed anyone in ambush--because that’s the way the executions were carried out--would be to put a placard on the victims chest with a string around his neck explaining what the offense had been so that people would know why he had been, shall we say, quasi-legally executed.

So Tessie explained to me that I was the one who had shown them where the guns were. The boys that had found the guns were from my ship, and I was going to have a placard pinned on me. She wanted me to go right back to the ship then.

That was something to think about. After all, I had been wrongfully accused, but I didn’t feel that I should go around trying to explain to somebody about this accusation. So after that I was rather careful where I strayed when I went ashore in Queenstown, for fear that I might be wrongfully executed.

The Sinn Feiners were extremely active during World War I. You haveProject read in history about their connivance with the Germans and so on. As I say, Queenstown was a very interesting place during the war.

We didn’t stay in Queenstown very long after we first came back. TheySociety made us ready for sea right away. They sent us out to tow in a torpedoed ship. We had assumed that we would probably be transferred someplace to sweep mines, but after weHistory got over there, they decided that we would do rescue duty, towing in and trying to salvage torpedoed ships. I think we had been in about a day or two when they sent us out on our first assignment. When we were on the way to the ship we got a warning message by radio that thereOral was a submarine in the vicinity, and the location was given. The shore radio stations had direction finding devices so that they could get the directions of any submarine radio signal, get a cross bearing on it, and tell pretty nearly where it was. Historical

Well, lo and behold, when we checked on the position, we found it was right where we were! This warning had come fromHistory another ship, and the ship was only about a mile away from us. This was two days after we arrived in Queenstown. I put the glass on the ship. I had just got the spyglass in focus when there was a terrific eruption. I never knew that a torpedo could throw water and mess and debris as high as that geyser. I thought, “Oh, oh. My gosh, here we are here two days and already we’re right in the middle of it.”

We weren’tForest equipped Minnesotato battle any submarines. We had a three inch gun on our forecastle, but that was not proper armament to hunt submarines. Later on they put depth charges on our fantail. Well, we went on and finished our task, and that was the last torpedoing, the only torpedoing that we witnessed through the whole war from early 1918, the first week in January, until the end of the war. We never saw this submarine. She never came up. Apparently she saw us and got the radio warning signals and knew that she had been spotted, and off she went.

We had a battle twice, but the most interesting one was the great battle of the Lusitania buoy. One rather misty morning, the lookout yelled, “Periscope ahoy two points on the port bow.”

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While the lookout yelled, there was a periscope with a wake behind it. The guns were manned. We had never fired the three inch gun before. I think our crew had been trained out at Great Lakes, and it was probably the first shot they had ever fired. So we fired at this periscope, and all the windows smashed in, of course. There was a terrific noise.

We fired two shots, and the periscope stayed right where it was, seemingly just steaming ahead. We got close enough so that we could get a view of it with our glasses, and very soon we found out we had been firing at a spar buoy marking the location where the Lusitania had gone. So it was an exciting battle. The tidal flow had made it look like a wake.

We had one battle though, and we took an awful lot of ribbing about it. One morning I was napping in my bunk and the pharmacist’s mate shook my shoulder and said, “Carl, get right up on the bridge. There’s a submarine alongside.”

I said, “Get away from me.” Project He said, “No, I’m not kidding you.”

I said, “Why doesn’t that siren go off?” Society He said, “The skipper doesn’t want to blow it. He doesn’t think they’ve seen us yet.” History I clambered out because I could see that he was white as a sheet and very much upset. I climbed up on the bridge and sure enough out here, not alongside, but out some five or six hundred yards, was a big submarine on the surface. She hadOral two guns on her deck, and we could see her quite plainly. She was still in the water, and we were just turning to steam toward her. This was many months after the famous battle of the Lusitania buoy. Shortly after that, our gunner’s mate’s term expired and he was discharged and nobody hadHistorical taken care of the gun.

We got pointed toward the submarine. We were really going to battle it this time. We found that the gun was all salted tightHistory and we cou1dnt train it. So there was nothing to do but to turn around and get out of there as fast as we could. We had two machine guns, old Colt machine guns, that started out very slowly and then increasing in firing. One of my assignments, doubling, tripling or quadrupling in brass, was that of machine gunner. I had never fired. I did read the instruction book and knew how it worked. So I had the machine gun trained on the submarine in case anyone came out on deck. ForestMinnesota They did come out on deck. As I recall it, we fired a few halfhearted shots at it, but we never knew where they went. We could see some spurts, but I don’t think anybody got hurt. When they got about three quarters of a mile or a mile away, they opened up on us, and fired, but they missed us by far.

The thing we were kidded about was this: of course, we immediately radioed for help. I remember the messages coming up to the bridge. One of them asked us what speed we could make. We said we could make eleven knots. Another message came up about ten or fifteen

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minutes later. “What speed are you making?” The skipper sent back, “We are making fourteen knots.” That also became a saga of Queenstown. Years afterw ards, back in 1938 or 1939, a commander visited my office when I was director of education and research for the National Association of Credit Men. At that time, I was asked to fill out my application for a commission as Lieutenant commander in the intelligence division. When I told him what my service had been during the war and mentioned the Genessee, he immediately remembered that story. He had been in the message center at the time in Queenstown, and told about us being chased for two hours by this submarine.

Well, we came back into Queenstown exceedingly chagrined. We certainly were not welcomed back as heroes. We were immediately put into dry-dock. The admiral explained. We were going to have a gun put on our stern, a gun that we would find much more useful, which was, of course, a pretty bare insult. Well, we did have the gun put on the stern, but we never did have occasion to use the guns again.

We did have occasion at one time to drop some depth charges. As I said,Project we could go about eleven knots. We had seen depth charges toss destroyers around, and they go pretty fast. We often wondered what on earth would happen to us when we rolled a depth charge off the end of our fantail. Society We sighted a periscope one day. It was one of those days when there were misty patches. We had a terrible time trying to spot it. By that time, we had listeningHistory devices, and we had several men trained to use them. They heard signals from the submarine and directed us to where they thought it was. We got orders to drop the depth charge over the side, which we did, nothing happened. We dropped another, and nothingOral happened. We wondered why on earth these depth charges didn’t go off. A destroyer came up in the vicinity and we explained that we had dropped depth charges and they did not function. I think that was the first time I ever heard that word “function” used. Historical

Well, when we got back into Queenstown, we found out why. We had a brand new gunner’s mate who knew nothing whateverHistory about depth charges, and none of us knew that there was a safety fork on the end of the depth charge that had to be pulled before it was dropped overboard! So we dropped these two depth charges without properly arming them or taking off the safety fork. More chagrin.

By that time we were being kidded a great deal by other sailors because these stories went the rounds, ofForest course-- aboutMinnesota being chased by the submarine, about having a gun put on our stern because that’s where we would be most likely to use it, how our tail end was pointing at a submarine, about dropping the depth charges overboard without taking out the safety fork, about having a battle royal with the Lusitania buoy.

We lost our Swedish skipper early in our Queenstown days. It seems they had psychologists even in those days, and some of the officers to whom Teasel had reported suspected that probably he was not entirely emotionally balanced. So they had him over for an examination. Teasel came

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back to the ship and said, “Henrikson, I passed my examination.”

“You passed your examination? Were you up for an increase in rating?”

“Oh no. Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“They were examining me to find out whether I’m crazy or not. I am, and I’m leaving the boat.” He was packing up. Teasel didn’t turn out to be so crazy. He didn’t like the tub. We found out that some months later, after undergoing more thorough examinations in the States, he had been given a berth on the fastest ship on the northern Atlantic, the U.S.S. Northern Pacific, as navigating officer; so he did all right.

Our new skipper had just been recently appointed ensign, and had risen in one fell swoop from boatswain’s mate second class to ensign. He was a coxswain on the admiral’sProject barge. One of the admirals was stationed on the U.S.S. Melville. I hope that if anyone reads this, they don’t take this as derogatory of the captain. We all felt, of course, that what on earth were we getting, a fellow who was a boatswain’s mate second class just a week before, and now he was coming over to take charge of our tub. Society

One of his first movements of the bug Genessee was toHistory coal up in an old wooden coal hawk that one time had been the pride of the seas, a British wooden battleship. This coal hawk was close by the Melville, and the skipper insisted that he was going to give the engine room signals, which were bells and jingles. I had the wheel. Priorly,Oral I had always handled the engine room signals and the wheel. It’s like driving an automobile, trying to have one fellow steer and the other fellow handle the clutch and the gearshift. Historical Well, he started giving orders. All his old shipmates on the Melville were lined up along the rail to see the new skipper in his tug. Again, I believed in following orders to the letter. The poor skipper got mixed up andHistory I knew it, but I couldn’t grab the signals away from him. We ploughed into the wooden coal hawk--really smashed into her. We heard a great roar of laughter from all the boys along the rail of the Melville.

We got coaled up, and then we were to go back. Again this man was going to wheel her back. The poor fellow put her on the beach. He didn’t know the depth of the waters around harbor, and those of usForest who had beenMinnesota on the tub a while did, of course. I was nervous when I saw it, and felt it coming.

He later turned out to be a pretty good skipper. They didn’t can him for what he had done that day. Of course, a story went around that what helped him get his commission was that one night coming back from shore the admiral slipped off his barge, went into the water, and the boatswain yanked him out. Whether there’s any truth to the story, I don’t know. Probably not.

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The skipper picked up a mongrel pup on the shore one day. What a crying, unpleasant cur that dog was. None of us liked him. I was going ashore and the captain asked me if I would take the dog ashore for a little airing. I said sure, I would take the dog ashore. I did, and everybody on the ship whispered out of the side of his mouth, “If you don’t lose that dog, believe me, it’s your neck.” Well, I didn’t mean to lose the dog, but while I was back in the hills, the tug got sudden orders to pull out. They whistled and whistled for me, but I didn’t hear the whistle, so I got left on the beach and lost the dog.

While I was on the beach, I went over to the Melville and slept, and went up to the signal station up on the hill run by the British navy. They were having flag hoist drills, maneuvering little fleets of brass ships. I went up there day after day after day, got in on the flag hoist drills, and learned these maneuver signals. We had none of that in the United States Navy.

Our destroyers were also given orders to learn these fleet maneuver signals. We had a little fleet, as I recall it, of eight brass ships about one inch long that we maneuvered with each hoist of signals. Usually a hoist is three or four flags. Project

When the ship got back in, I made my peace with the captain for losing his dog. A few days later, they were going to run a contest on flag hoists. There was hoist after hoist, and the man maneuvered these ships around the deck on the bridge of our ship. TheSociety signals were being sent from the signal station up on top of the hill over on the dockyard on the island. Lo and behold, when the final hoist went up. “What is your disposition?”History (In other words, “How are your ships arranged?) I looked down at my ships and gave orders for the flag hoist to the boys who were doing the hoisting, and gave them what I thought was my disposition. I looked down the line at the British sloops, the British destroyers andOral the American destroyers, and my signal wasn’t the same as any of them--I was just different. Then when they raised the next signal, “The correct disposition should be. . . I never got such a thrill in all my life! “. . . The tugboat.” Historical I had gone in on it voluntarily; I didn’t have to get in on it.

For that little luck--it wasHistory probably luck-- we got the British admiral’s barge alongside and got a “VGI”, which is a designation for excellence in signaling. It means “Very Good Indeed”. When I started this thing, the skipper said, “Look, this is entirely unofficial. This is entirely unofficial. I don’t have any part of this at all.”

I said, “Sure, we’re just practicing.” ForestMinnesota But he was perfectly glad to welcome the admiral up the side of the ship when he came along. Of course, he welcomed the admiral much better than our old skipper, Teasel. Teasel would lie around in his undershirt, and when a visiting officer would approach in a boat, he would quickly put on his jacket, go down to the side of ship--a tugboat, you know, lies very low in the water; it’s three foot sea board, and then there’s about two feet--reach down, grab an officer by the hand, and lift him bodily with one hand from his boat up on the deck. His usual greeting would be this: “Teasel is my name.”

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The officer would start telling the captain his name and the captain would say, “That’s all right. Never mind. Won’t know it five minutes from now anyhow.” That was always the standard greeting.

One Teasel story which almost had me falling out of the rigging was when we were taking submarines in Cow. The tow line had parted as usual. It was right at lunchtime, and we all got up from our meals and went to work. I climbed the rigging because the sea was running quite heavily, and I had to be up there in order to see any semaphore signals or blinker signals from the conning tower while the tug was in trough. The skipper was sitting down on the after deck house, giving orders on the detail of getting out the towing line. When he had run out of the galley he had put a lot of bacon and eggs in his white hat and put it right on his head. He would take off his hat every now and then and reach in and grab some bacon and some eggs, and put them in his mouth. He happened to look up at me while I was relaying a signal to him, and I saw the bacon grease and the egg yolks running down his forehead and his cheeks from under his hat. It was a sight to behold and one long to be remembered. Project The old skipper often told me that just as soon as he could he was going to retire from the sea and go on a farm, but I doubt that he ever did. He was a big, husky roly poly fellow with a white mustache and a florid face, a typical Swedish sea gull with a very strong Swedish accent. At that time, I couldn’t speak Swedish, but I could understand it. I could readSociety it barely, from having read the comic sections of the Swedish newspapers when I was a boy. One time I had occasion to copy down a Swedish message in semaphore which theHistory skipper could read and which I think I read very well too.

The skipper was not one for too strict navalOral discipline. The crew both hated and loved Tease. I recall one evening, Teasel was a cigar smoker, and he was quite insistent that we be very careful about smoking around the decks in the war zone. This one night Teasel was smoking this glowing cigar--he was very careful except for hisHistorical own cigar smoking - - and he went aft in the deck house. Suddenly the lookout called, “Rocket! Three points off the starboard beam!” I had happened to be looking back there at the same time and I knew what the lookout had seen. He had seen Teasel snap his Historycigar butt out over the ocean, and it looked like a rocket.

Old man Teasel had another kind of a dirty habit of relieving his body at night off the edge of the upper deck. One night he happened to sprinkle one of the sailors down below. I never heard a sailor cuss out a commanding officer the way he did, and he got by with it.

Some of theForest seas that weMinnesota went through off Queenstown were terrific. It’s almost unbelievable what a tugboat like that can stand. One night we were in a terrifically heavy storm. I was trying to get some sleep on the floor of the pilot house, curled around the binnacle which holds the compass. We changed course. We were on patrol at that time. Usually when we were not out at sea after some ship, we patrolled an area of about thirty miles from the lightship outside Queens- town harbor and off to the east. Well, we changed course and got into a very bad sea. A whole wave hit us, came in through the door, and filled the pilot house. Here was the highest part of the ship full of water, and I was submerged! It broke all the windows again. The windows in the pilot house broke regularly. I tried to fit storm curtains over it, and we had bars put across with

56

canvas curtains to save them, but the sea has a terrific force, and it will go through canvas and glass like nothing.

One other experience at sea, which I thought was my last for a while was this: when we were towing, we had to rig the tap rail log out on a spar so as to clear the shrouds, the rigging that goes up from the bulwarks up to the top of the mast. We had to do that so the log and the spinner on the end of the line wouldn’t get fouled in the towing line. Every hour we had to go down to read the log. We read that by letting go of one line and pulling the log forward, so that I could pull it up to the rail and read it.

Well, this night the skipper changed course while I was down reading the log, and a terrific sea came over the bow and swept me off my feet. It, of course, took the spar and the tap rail log out, too. I felt myself being tossed along in a terrific turmoil of water, end over end. I felt something and grabbed it. It felt as if my arms were being torn right out of my shoulder sockets, but I held on. I suppose it was just a matter of seconds when the water washed away, and I found myself holding on to a rung in the shrouds with my feet about four feet off theProject deck. It was just a happy grab at the shrouds or I’d have been at sea, and they couldn’t have picked me up.

Why men weren’t washed overboard with a freeboard of a few feet and the seas pouring over the sides all the time continues to be a wonder to me. One impression youSociety get of the way the ship behaves at sea is when you stand on the very after part and goes into a trough, and you look downhill and see the bow way off and way down, pointingHistory almost straight down. Then she heaves straight up and you look way uphill and see that bow pointing so far up. You see these huge waves that look to be sixty or seventy feet high--they’re probably only twenty-five or thirty feet high, but that’s the way they look--andOral it’s just awesome. You wonder how on earth the tug is going to be kept from going completely awash and underneath. You had a lot of respect for shipbuilders when you saw what a ship like theHistorical tug could go through.

History

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